My husband hailed a cab, and I got into the back seat, still holding the baby. “Wait, look!” someone said. “What’s she doing?” People were frowning now, and pointing. Then I, with my son in my lap, and my husband, with our car seat in his lap—the one that took me four hours in the Chelsea buybuyBABY to choose—sped off toward home.

Am I the only mother who sympathizes with Britney Spears? Worse than recovering from my emergency C-section, or pumping, or finding a nanny and leaving my son with a veritable stranger, the car seat—with its incongruous toile canopy—has been my biggest hurdle. I hate strapping him in with the five-point-star harness straps (or whatever), his little shoulders all hunched, the buckle pressing down on his little penis.

“I’d rather pick my way through Baghdad than take my baby in a cab,” said a friend at lunch.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, shocked. “I do it all the time. Look how slow they go.” I pointed out the window at the taxis speeding down Seventh Avenue. “So you install a car seat every time you take a taxi?”

“No, I walk or take the subway. Do you see how they drive?”

“If I get a bad driver, I say, ‘Hey, buddy, your driving’s for shit’—and if he doesn’t improve, I get out,” I said. That seems a lot safer than telling the crazy person on the subway to pull his pants back up or wheeling the stroller 40 blocks in a windstorm.

Dr. Margaret Lewin, a Manhattan internist, makes it her No. 1 priority to warn patients to always wear seatbelts in cabs; she even interrogates them about it during physicals. In her office is a photo of a smashed-up taxi. “One patient lost an eye on one of those change things in the partition,” Dr. Lewin said in a phone interview, “and one patient lost most of her teeth. And one woman, who’s actually quite stocky, got stuck in the space between the back seat and the partition and pulled every muscle and tendon in her body. She was disabled for a month.”

Which was worse, I wondered: being called “quite stocky,” or being disabled for a month?

“You’re a missile back there,” Dr. Lewin continued. “Once I told a patient there are 50 taxi accidents a day in New York, and she turned out to work at the Taxi and Limousine Commission. And she said, ‘That’s just the tip of the iceberg.’”

Leaving my building one morning, I saw a neighbor, Cathleen Dehn, a pediatric nurse-practitioner at St. Vincent’s Hospital. She and her nanny were struggling to unload her 9-month-old twins, Benjamin and Alexander, from a car. Each twin was in his own huge blue car seat with wheels, which was supposed to convert into a stroller but looked more like an open suitcase on wheels. “Those are some car seats,” I said, amazed at the sight of her big, beautiful twins in those contraptions. “These are the Sit ’n’ Strolls,” she said, “but you really need another person with you to help with the stroller conversion.”

Yeah, like a rabbi, I thought.

“We had a lot of trouble!” the nanny agreed.

“You don’t want to carry the babies on your lap?” I asked.

“No! You should never do that,” Cathleen said. “They can sustain head and abdominal trauma that way. The baby is essentially used as an airbag. We had one come in who had to have her liver repaired.”

“From an accident in a taxi?”

“No, it was a family car—but we see a lot of kids struck by taxis in their strollers. Sometimes moms are in a rush to get to their appointments,” she said sweetly.

I tried to wipe the “Oops! I did it again” look off my face.

“It’s very important,” Cathleen continued. “I’m hoping they make a change in the law and require taxis to keep car seats in their trunks. We have a few loaners at the hospital and we offer them to new parents, and I’ve even gone down to the street and helped them strap them into taxis. With preemies, we make sure they’re propped and positioned with a stroller roll under the neck and shoulders.”

“It must take so long,” I said. “It took me and my husband three months to figure out how to install the car seat in our car.” We’d finally paid the doorman to do it; I’d called a number for a service that was supposed to do it for you correctly, but no one ever answered.

“It took my husband and his best friend 40 minutes the first time,” Cathleen said, adding cheerfully: “Now it takes me about a minute and a half. It got my upper arms back in shape.

She might be cheerful about this, but I’m not. I have taken cabs in New York my whole life. The best moments of my childhood were hailing cabs with my mother, jumping in “two girls together” and going to Bloomingdale’s and Chock Full o’ Nuts. Those days would’ve been ruined had I been restrained in a Sit ’n’ Stroll. I couldn’t wait to raise my own baby in New York. Now, if I have to bring a car seat, a trip to the Museum of Natural History suddenly seems as arduous as it must’ve been to ride your horse up to the Dakota in 1884, toned upper arms aside.

“What about the olden days—the 60’s and 70’s?” I asked my friend at lunch. “Or what about Pa and Ma in Little House on the Prairie, taking Laura across Minnesota in a covered wagon? They were good parents.”

“There was a lot less traffic back then,” she said.

I care about my child’s safety, but sometimes I take some risks. I didn’t pay a “professional baby-proofer” $1,000 to crawl around my apartment on hands and knees. I didn’t banish an antique rocking horse, even though it may have tested positive for lead paint. My son crawls in the rat-infested playground. After all, no one complained that he used me as an airbag for nine months.

I called the Taxi and Limousine Commission for crash statistics and spoke to Allan Fromberg, the deputy commissioner of public affairs. It felt a little like the time I interviewed Curtis Sliwa in the seventh grade. “Those statistics come from the Department of Motor Vehicles, and they don’t break out yellow cabs from limo companies, car services and out-of-town liveries,” he said. “It’s all under ‘for-hire vehicles,’ so the statistics are very unclear. Every cab is equipped with a universal-restraint latch, and we encourage concerned parents to bring along a car seat. We strongly advocate for that. The bottom line is, we are specifically exempt from the law that requires car seats.”

But I, as a mother, was not exempt. I couldn’t find a single mother beside myself who takes taxis willy-nilly. A message board I visited online crucified Britney for speeding away from the paparazzi with her baby, Sean Preston, on her lap in the driver’s seat. The mothers were furious, writing comments like, “It shows you can’t take the trailer out of the trash,” and “She should be in prison,” and “Why do some people have children?”

There’s danger everywhere. My baby started out in danger when he was still inside me, because he was still inside me, suspended in not enough amniotic fluid. You have to accept a little danger, especially when you have a baby. As my husband said the other day, “I’m terrified all the time, so, in an odd way, that makes me more relaxed.” Even our ports aren’t safe anymore. And if strapping your kid down in a cab gives you a sliver of peace of mind, then I, like the T.L.C., strongly advocate for that. I called Schneider’s, and they said they have the Sit ’n’ Stroll in stock for $199.99. But I just couldn’t bring myself to buy it. And the funny thing is, if I did go there to get it, the baby and I would take a taxi.

"She said, 'See if you like the duvet cover; it matches your espresso headboard,'" recalled Ms. Heaton, who had already spent more than $6,000 on the headboard and a queen-size mattress, charging it to her credit card. "The charge went right through. She said, 'Your credit must be terrific.' She was extremely nice to me-until the curtain rod fell on me."

Ms. Heaton is a 54-year-old part-time yoga instructor and former health-club manager who took early retirement and just moved into an East End Avenue apartment. She decided to splurge on bedding but, according to Ms. Heaton, calamity ensued after she accepted the saleswoman's offer to luxuriate in the display bed's comfort. "I sat on the display bed and said, 'This really feels nice.' It had a valence, or canopy, around it. It came crashing down and hit me on the head. I have this huge bump over the eye."

Pamela Scheirman, the store's manager, denied she ever suggested the customer take the bed for a test drive. "She stepped up into a display bed in the window," she said. "She was somewhere she shouldn't have been. She wanted to buy the duvet cover that was in the window, but I never told her to sit on it. I would never tell a customer, 'Please sit on a display bed so you could break it and possibly get hurt.'"

After the accident, Ms. Heaton acknowledges that Ms. Scheirman offered to call her an ambulance, which she declined. Their relationship started to sour after the customer asked to be supplied with a statement on company letterhead documenting the incident, and the two began to argue about what had actually transpired and who was to blame.

"She said, 'You must have pulled it down. How come you sat on the bed?'" Ms. Heaton contends. "I said, 'You asked me to. I didn't pull anything. You were looking right at me, Pamela.'

"She said, 'We are not responsible for accidents that are caused by customers.' She said, 'I refuse to write or sign anything about this incident, and I'd like you to leave the store.' She went from Pollyanna into a Nurse Ratchet.

"I said, 'Can I make a phone call?' She said, 'There's a phone booth outside.'"

Ms. Scheirman has a somewhat different recollection of events. "She sat down and I got her some cold paper towels," she said. "I asked her whether she needed an ambulance, and she said no. I didn't even see so much as a red dot or a lump or anything.

"So it's closing time," she continued. "We're getting ready to leave, and she stands up and says to me, 'I need you to document that I was hurt here.' I was going to write her, 'Customer was in a display area. Broke display,' but she said, 'No, let me write it on your letterhead.' I was not about to let her write something on blank letterhead. Unfortunately, I had to call the police to get her out of there."

"Pamela said, 'We may need to call the police to have you taken out," recalled Ms. Heaton, adding that Ms. Scheirman by now was on the phone with her district manager. "She said, 'This lady is making a scene. I'm going to have to push the panic button because she won't leave.'"

Ms. Scheirman did indeed push the panic button. When the NYPD didn't respond promptly enough, she also called 911. "Five police officers came because she pushed the panic button so many times," Ms. Heaton said. "Three police cars with sirens."

Ms. Scheirman said it was actually two police cars responding, with a total of four officers.

One of the responding officers offered to call Ms. Heaton an ambulance, which never came; she eventually went to New York–Presbyterian Hospital on her own, where she was treated and released-but, she said, still suffers from headaches. The officer, she added, shared her chagrin at the rough treatment she received. "He said, 'You spent $6,000 on a mattress and they were throwing you out of the store?'"

On May 15, Ms. Scheirman called to apologize, Ms. Heaton said, but with some surprising news. "She said, 'For the best interest of the store, we need to cancel your order.'"

"She's more than welcome to place the order at any other Duxiana store," Ms. Scheirman explained. "But as far as this store, it seemed like she had a lot of hostility, and we didn't want to proceed with the order. Someone who's behaving in that manner is just going to be problems down the line. So it's in our best interests not to proceed, honestly."

At the moment, Ms. Heaton is sleeping on the floor of her new apartment, still pining away for the bed of her dreams. "I've never bought such an expensive item," she stated. "I said, 'For the first time in my life, I want the best.' It was the best I was dying for, and I almost did."