'She wasn't breathing': Mum warns of cot's dangers after daughter suffocates

An Australian mother is warning all parents of the dangers of cot inserts after her two-month-old baby girl suffocated when she went down for a nap.

Carly Wowk, 21, has been campaigning for cot inserts to be taken off the market after she held her limp, blue baby in her arms for the final time.

Zara Skye had just gone down for an afternoon nap, as did her mother, before Ms Wowk was woken by her partner's screams.

Ms Wowk says she jolted awake and thought her partner had chopped his thumb off.

"The pain in his cry was undeniable and he brought her into the lounge room. He held her in such a way as if to say 'look at her'," Ms Wowk told the Daily Mail.

The Canberra mother of three said she started screaming and flipped the table to get to her partner and her baby.

When she noticed Zara was blue she told her partner to start CPR while she called an ambulance, but it was too late.

While Zara was still warm, she was stiff and she was gone.

"I knew she wasn't breathing," Ms Wowk said.

It took four minutes for the ambulance to arrive, the longest four minutes of the couple's lives.

While the paramedic said they need to prepare themselves, Ms Wowk and her partner weren't giving up.

"I honestly expected them to fix her 100 per cent. There wasn't a tiny part of me that thought she was going to die - it was a complete shock," she said.

"I said 'what? You have to promise me you're not going to give up' and I made the poor man promise - I probably ruined his day."

Ms Wowk and the family were taken to hospital and it wasn't long before they were introduced to a social worker, which is when they say they knew their baby wasn't coming back.

Zara's brain had been deprived of oxygen for around two hours.

If she was able to be revived at that point, she would have been severely disabled.

"My partner and I held one hand of her hands each as they stopped working on her, as she passed away, and I held her for seven hours after that. It was the worst ten hours of my life," Ms Wowk said.

Zara had rolled onto her stomach - a skill her parents weren't aware she could do yet - and had pushed herself up onto the corner of the bed and suffocated inside it on November 19, 2015.

Ms Wowk said Zara died 20 minutes before they found her.

The autopsy results revealed the cause of death as SIDS asphyxiation.

Now raising awareness about the beds, Ms Wowk said she wants them banned from shelves or sold with the label "do not leave baby unattended in this bed as their is a possible suffocation risk".

"You never think its going to happen to you and I didn't know it was suffocation hazard. If I hadn't have used it I would have had a two year old walking around," she said.

Since Zara's death, Ms Wowk has given birth to her third daughter, Charlotte Hope.

She started a Facebook page, Awareness for Zara Skye where she hopes to reach as many parents as possible with her story.

Ms Wowk said she hopes warning other parents about the risk of the cot insert will help save other babies in Zara's name.