When people acknowledge that life expectancy has increased dramatically in the past 5 decades, many mistakenly believe it is because of huge improvements in care for diseases that affect adults and the elderly at the end of their lives. What is missed is that many, if not most, of the gains we have seen are the result of saving the lives of children and infants. Saving an infant adds many more years to overall life expectancy at birth than does prolonging an older person’s life for a few years.