It's No Accident: How Corporations
Sell Dangerous Baby Products

Author Profile

E. Marla Felcher, Ph.D., is a freelance journalist who has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, Wildlife Conservation and other consumer magazines. She is an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a former Senior Lecturer of Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and a former Assistant Professor Integrated Marketing Communication at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

  In 1998, Ms. Felcher moved from Chicago to Boston for a nine month leave-of-absence from Northwestern University, where she had been teaching Marketing Management in the business school. She planned to spend this time on her hobby, writing fiction. Six weeks into this plan, her friends’ 16-month old son Danny was killed by a Playschool portable crib. At Danny’s funeral, Ms. Felcher vowed to find out how the son of two safety-vigilant parents could have been killed by a name-brand product. After scrutinizing thousands of pages of government documents, internal corporate memos and legal documents, and interviewing dozens of government regulators, consumer advocates and parents whose children had been killed by defective products, Ms. Felcher learned that Danny’s fate was not as rare as it should have been. Her investigation culminated in numerous magazine articles and It’s No Accident: How Corporations Sell Dangerous Baby Products, a book documenting the failure of the U.S. government to adequately regulate the baby products industry.