Seen from the Very First Minute

In 1952, at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, Dr. Virginia Apgar recognized a troubling pattern. In delivery rooms across America, medical attention focused almost entirely on the mother after birth, while newborns were often set aside with little systematic evaluation. Distress in infants went unnoticed until it was too late. Apgar, a pioneering anesthesiologist, refused to accept this. She devised a simple scoring system — five criteria including heart rate, muscle tone, reflex response, respiratory effort, and skin color — each rated zero to two, assessed at one minute and again at five minutes after delivery. For the first time in modern obstetrics, every newborn received individual, immediate attention from the moment they entered the world.

What drove Apgar was a fierce conviction that no infant should arrive unnoticed. Every baby deserved someone paying close attention from the very first moment of life.

Long before Virginia Apgar gave medicine a way to see each child, God declared a far deeper knowing. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you," the Almighty told Jeremiah, "before you were born I set you apart" (Jeremiah 1:5). Apgar's score ensured that a trained eye would watch for every newborn at one minute old. But the Holy One has been watching since before that first minute — before the first heartbeat, before the first cell divided. You were never overlooked. The God who formed you has known you longer than you have drawn breath.