Don't leave your child in the car to Cook.

[Jenny A]

It isn't about who cares most for their child.  It's about the problems with human memory:

Our conscious mind prioritizes things by importance, but on a cellular level, our memory does not. If you’re capable of forgetting your cellphone, you are potentially capable of forgetting your child.”

David Diamond, professor of molecular physiology at the University of South Florida

Diamond explains it this way:

The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that’s why you’ll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

The number of deaths due to children over heating in cars rose rapidly in the 1990s and has stayed high ever since.  What happened?  Car seats  that must be placed in the back seat happened.  Once the baby in the car was removed from sight, accident rose.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25...97956.html

This is a problem not just with babies and car seats but with other systems. I remember reading a number of old London cases involving a rash of inattentive bus drivers lopping the top off of double decker buses killing the passengers on the upper deck.  It wasn't that the drivers had suddenly become bad people who no longer valued the life of their passengers.  What had happened was that several routes had altered slightly to accommodate new double deckers and the same drivers had remained on those route.  Not surprisingly some of these reverted to the old route do to inattention.  Many lives could have been saved by swapping the drivers.

Hospitals are finally beginning to recognize that some systems are prone to human error and admonishing the doctors and staff doesn't help.  Changing the system does.  Airlines have known and acted on this knowledge for a long  time. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/15/magazi...all&src=pm

The solution to infant deaths in hot cars is not to blame the parent but the establish systems for reminding the parent the child is in the back seat.  Do it yourself solutions include putting as stuffed animal in the car seat and placing the animal in the front seat whenever there is a baby in the car seat or putting your cell phone or purse next to the car seat in back.  I can imagine better built-in systems.  What I can't see is how shaming or jailing the parents will help.