The majority of the sick babies seem in good health at birth and early diagnosis of the various pathologies that can afflict newborn is crucial. For this reason we introduce in this paper the use of the fundamental frequency and the different modes of cries as Hyper-phonation, phonation and high pitched cries to differentiate the pathological cries from the cries of the healthy babies. The automatic estimation of these characteristics enabled us to establish a quantitative characterization of healthy newborn cries and pathologic newborn cries. The results obtained agree with the spectrographic analysis carried out on the healthy and pathologic cries of the newborns.