Alison Godfrey, The Naughty Corner 

Baby Amelie is snuggled up in her port-a-bed next to me in my bed. She’s had a good breastfeed and fallen fast asleep – milk drunk.

Her chest rises and falls softly. Her lips curl up in the slightest of smiles. She’s just a few days old and has a lifetime of memories before her.

I pull the covers up over me and doze off too.

I’m not sure what woke me first – my husband, or the eerie feeling that something was wrong.

Amelie has stopped breathing.

Her chest is still.

My husband pulls her from her bed drags her up to his chest and yells “breathe”.

My stomach is at my feet.

Less than twenty seconds later, baby Amelie gasps and draws a breath. It’s the longest half a minute of my life.

It could have been so different. It could have been tragic.

We could have lost our daughter.

Last week the Victorian coroner warned about the dangers of co-sleeping.

Alarming new data released last week showed that co-sleeping, where a baby shares a bed with an adult, is linked to nearly one in two sudden infant death syndrome cases in Victoria.

The Herald Sun reported Coroner John Olle opened a formal hearing into the co-sleeping trend, which he described as “breathtaking” and “alarming”.

As a tiny baby, Amelie never really liked her cot. She slept best when she was next to me. Even now that she is 15-months-old, she likes someone to be in her room when she falls asleep. When she was a baby we put her in a portable bed in between us - the kind you use in strollers - to try to make it a little safer than just sleeping on our mattress and to prevent her rolling around, risking suffocation. But it wasn’t free of dangers. The port-a-bed has soft sides and I could have rolled onto her if I was a restless sleeper.

Still, I have no doubt that co-sleeping with her in those early weeks saved her life. If we were not next to her, I’m not sure she would have started to breath again. We asked the midwives about what happened the next day, worried that there was something wrong with our daughter. They told us that it was very common for little babies to suddenly stop breathing. Most of the time, they start again.

But what do you think? Did you sleep with your baby despite the cot death warnings? Why? Why not? How do your babies sleep?