Just one is worth it.

That’s what a Bothell trio lists as its motto and hopes to achieve with its involvement with the Washington Newborn Safety Act. Retired nurses Joan Dedman and Virginia Pfalzer co-founded the act, which was signed a state law in 2002, and Donald Bagnall is the board chairman for the nonprofit Safe Place for Newborns of Washington.

“If we just save one life … And I know that there have been many,” Dedman said on a recent afternoon at Bothell’s downtown Fire Station 42.

On that day, Dedman and Bagnall were on hand as station officials posted a sign identifying the location where mothers may transfer newborn babies, up to 72 hours old, and not incur criminal charges. This 2009 amendment to the act — which goes into effect July 1 — requires all staffed fire stations, hospitals and federally designated rural health clinics in Washington to post the signs.

Dedman didn’t have an exact number of signs ordered, but noted that there are 132 rural health clinics in the state, plus fire stations and hospitals. Signs come in both English and Spanish. Dedman and Bagnall’s organization has partnered with the Washington Fire Chief’s Association and received a $10,000 grant from the Muckleshoot Charitable fund to produce the signs.

“This is an opportunity to save a child,” added Bagnall, a former Canyon Park Junior High principal. “Obviously, our message is directed to pregnant women, but we would like everyone to know. We’d like parents to know about it, teenagers — somebody might know someone, and that person might be willing to chat with this friend and say, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ and this person can say, ‘I know there’s a law … you can take the baby to a fire station.’”

Due to privacy laws, Dedman said they don’t have exact numbers on lives saved, but “we have a lot of connections with hospitals and with doctors and with nurses, and we’ve got word that we’re doing well. We’re working with the Legislature to get statistics.”

Back in 2000, Dedman and Pfalzer were visiting with some friends, and one woman noted that someone found a newborn on a sidewalk in the Magnolia neighborhood and some other newborns in other areas during that time frame. They planned to try and stop the problem, made some calls and chartered with folks in Minnesota who had founded a Newborn Safety Act.

“They mentored us, and we took off,” said Dedman, who nursed at the Seattle VA Hospital for 26 years.

The act didn’t pass the first time it arrived in Olympia, but the Bothell women kept pushing it, keeping it alive in state senators’ and representatives’ minds until it passed in 2002.

Once the act passed, members of their organization did everything from placing posters in buses and on backdoors of women’s bathrooms in 150 restaurants up and down the Interstate 5 corridor, spoke at schools and placed ads in college newspapers.

“We just worked very hard, but I always felt like there was something more that we needed,” Dedman said of the signs, the newest piece of the Newborn Safety Act’s story. “We were sending out busloads of material, there was a rash again of abandonments. We heard of signs in Illinois and researched our own sign.”

Bothell Fire Chief Bob Van Horne sat in on the conversation with Dedman and Bagnall, listening intently to their story and history of the Newborn Safety Act.

“I think it’s an honor that the state would even consider us to be one of the safe places to drop off an infant,” he said. “We in the fire service, we’re dedicated to community service, and this is just an extension of the service that we can provide, and ultimately taking care of our youngest patients who can’t help themselves.”