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He worked for the passage of major public health legislation; most notably, he helped secure millions in federal dollars for research into sudden infant death syndrome.
Dr. Abraham B. Bergman, a pediatrician who was instrumental in passing a federal law to combat sudden infant death syndrome, a once misunderstood loss that caused not just parental heartbreak but guilt and blame, and who put his stamp on other enduring public health laws, died on Nov. 10 in Seattle. He was 91.
The cause of his death, on a family member’s boat, was amyloid heart disease, his son Ben Bergman said.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, Dr. Bergman was president of the National Foundation for Sudden Infant Death, a grass-roots group that supported parents who had lost children to what once was commonly called crib death. Although SIDS, as the syndrome became known, was the leading killer of infants less than a year old, its cause was unknown. Parents often blamed themselves, marriages broke up and, in some cases, authorities investigated for child abuse.
“What we do to those parents is crime,” Dr. Bergman told The New York Times in 1972. “The police investigate, there’s a coroner’s inquest, and often the family doctor abandons the parents.”