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Conspiracy? I’ve always been under the impression it was an open secret, that SIDS was mostly a face-saving coverall.
A) To let presumably grieving parents (especially mothers) save face and/or avoid blaming themselves for the infant’s death. Plus, not many people want to be a big meanie and ask too many difficult questions to a parent (especially a mother) who just lost a baby, even if it might be more like “lost” in many cases.
B) To let the poor and BIPOC save face. Like @wqnm and @burkeboi mentioned, SIDS occurs most frequently among the demographics you most expect, and without SIDS as an alibi we’d be outing such parents (especially [single] mothers) as careless, impulsive, neglectful, and/or malicious, and we can’t have that.
SIDS is a tragedy that can strike any mother of an infant at any time. If It Just So Happens that SIDS occurs more frequently among mothers from underserved and minority communities, that only means we need to provide such communities with more support and resources (i.e., taxpayer gibs).
Not according to the demographic most likely to take it seriously (which conversely Just So Happens to be the demographic that suffers from SIDS the least frequently), who are likely to try and spend resources preventing it.
Beyond very obvious depraved-heart stuff like "gave birth in a bathroom and left the baby in the toilet" I think it's good such questions not be asked. If they were, we'd only be prosecuting it if the mother was white, as a natural extension of who over-zealous CPS reporting is most likely to affect now.
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