In a letter to her colleagues, Virginia Apgar writes, simply, “A baby’s life should count.” The sentence appears midway down a page dated March 1959. One line above it reads, “The newborn’s future hangs in the balance.” There is no transition between the two, no attempt to explain the connection. The words sit beside each other, bearing their weight without elaboration.
In another draft from later that year, the paragraph has been reworked. “A healthy infant is a cornerstone of societal well-being,” she writes, then crosses out “cornerstone” and replaces it with “pillar,” which is itself scratched away. What remains is not a perfected sentence but the trace of deliberation: a mind returning again and again to the same claim, uncertain which language can hold it.
Elsewhere, a sentence is left unfinished: “A baby’s life begins at birth.” In the margin, Apgar has written, “Is this too obvious?” Below it, a quieter revision appears: “Every infant deserves a chance to thrive.” The earlier sentence is never resolved. It is simply abandoned, as if stating the obvious still requires asking whether it is enough.
Across years of drafts, the same ideas recur with slight variation. “A healthy baby is born.” “Every newborn has value.” “Infants have inherent worth.” The repetition is deliberate but not explanatory. Apgar does not argue these points so much as hold them in view, testing whether repetition itself can make them real.
In one manuscript, two sentences appear side by side with no connective tissue: “Medical professionals have a responsibility to act.” “The newborn’s life hangs in the balance.” In later versions, one or the other is removed, then restored. The relationship between responsibility and consequence is never spelled out. It is assumed.
She returns repeatedly to the question of seriousness. “The care of the newborn must be taken seriously,” she writes, underlining “must” twice. In another draft, she circles the word “every” in the sentence “Every infant deserves a chance to thrive.” The emphasis shifts, but the concern does not.
At times, she seems to test the limits of moral language. “The care of the newborn is a moral imperative,” she writes, circling “moral” three times, then crossing the sentence out entirely. In another place, she replaces “personal responsibility” with “collective duty,” then scratches that out as well. What remains is not a doctrine, but a hesitation—an awareness that language can overreach even when the conviction behind it is firm.
Throughout her papers, certain phrases reappear almost obsessively. “A baby’s life begins at birth.” “The newborn’s future hangs in the balance.” “Infants have inherent value.” Each returns altered, questioned, or isolated on the page. None is allowed to settle into finality.
What emerges from these drafts is not a manifesto but a discipline of attention. Apgar does not tell the reader what to think. She keeps returning to the same sentences, as if asking whether saying them again—more carefully, more precisely—might be a form of care in itself.
In one late note, she writes: “What happens in the first minutes matters.” The sentence is never revised. It stands alone. Everything else circles it.
The work does not conclude. It accumulates. Page after page records the same insistence, held at slightly different angles: that a newborn is not an abstraction, not a statistic, not a future argument, but a life whose value must be recognized immediately, before explanation, before justification, before it is too late.