There appears to be an intense media campaign to help Chairman Ann Brown achieve her goal of banning baby bath seats. But Chairman Brown has kept the issue alive. Baby bath seats are devices to hold infants who cannot yet sit up alone in a sitting position in a bathtub, so that parents can more easily bathe them. If left unattended in the seat, an infant might slide down and drown.
Manufacturers warn against leaving children unattended in the bath seats.
Parents sometimes leave the baby alone for only a few minutes in the seat to perform another chore, and expose the infant to the danger of drowning. Then, the November 2000 issue of Atlantic Monthly published a lengthy article by E. Marla Felcher that listed baby bath seats as one of the products that CPSC has wrongly failed to regulate. Felcher cites lack of adequate funding for the agency and the restrictive CPSC statutes for these and other failures in the baby products area. In a letter to the Washington Post Oct. 23, Frances Smith, Executive Director of Consumer Alert, suggested the real cause of bath seat-related drownings is that parents leave infants in bathtubs unattended. Consumer Alert also submitted comments to the Commissioners arguing against granting the CFA petition to ban bath seats.