Couple makes pro-life message a roadside attraction

Billboards promoting birth, adoption are designed to influence passing motorists

SEATTLE
By Terry McGuire

These billboards will go up around the state this month as part of Pro-life Washington’s spring campaign. From left are Baby Jack, Baby Jacob and Baby PJ.

Anyone who’s ridden in a car has likely seen Matt and Georgene Ulrich’s ministry at work: Wide-eyed babies smiling down from billboards, a poignant message adjoining their photos.

“I’ve got my Daddy’s Eyes,” reads one.

“My Doc says, My heart was beating 24 days from conception,” says another.

States a third:  “What? You weren’t expecting me? Adoption.  2 million couples wait.”

The Ulriches, members of St. Mark Parish in Shoreline, have been spreading their roadside pro-life messages since 1991 when the couple dug into their own funds to purchase space on 10 billboards in the Seattle area for $5,000. Today, their donor-funded, nonprofit organization, Prolife Washington, of which they are the unpaid directors, sponsors from 150 to 200 billboards around the state each year, with costs ranging from $300 to $1,000 per month per billboard depending on location.

Their mission is to “save mothers and babies’ lives from abortion” and to “educate people in the state of Washington about life,” Georgene says.

When people ask how many babies they think they’ve saved over the years, the Ulriches answer they have no idea.

But “there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people that drive by these billboards,” Georgene says, so “you never know.”

‘Why don’t we do this here?’
Still, they hear the stories now and then. A woman in Everett working at a pregnancy resource center told them of a client who changed her mind about having an abortion after seeing their billboard by an abortion clinic. A woman in Spokane told the Ulriches she wouldn’t have gone through with her abortion some 30 years ago had she seen a message like theirs back then.

Georgene’s cousin, Mary Ann Kuharski, whose Minneapolis-based Prolife Across AMERICA has spread to 41 states, told her of the woman who was about to undergo an abortion until the abortionist informed her she was carrying twins – at which point she cancelled the procedure after recalling the pro-life billboard she had seen featuring twins. She went on to give birth.

It was Kuharski who sparked the Ulriches’ interest in starting a similar effort here. They read an article on her in the Knights of Columbus magazine, Columbia.

“We were very involved in a lot of ministries at St. Luke’s,” Georgene said of their former parish in Shoreline, “and we had been really praying about what God wanted us to do next.”
We thought, “’Why don’t we do this here; why don’t we put up 10 billboards and see what happens?’

“I had no idea that we would be putting up billboards 17 years later,” Georgene said, “and Mary Ann says the same thing (19 years later).”

More people involved
Though an independent operation, Prolife Washington purchases its posters for its billboards from Prolife Across AMERICA, which includes an 800-number for motorists to call.

When possible, Prolife Washington tries to locate the billboards near abortion clinics, universities and high schools.

Georgene Ulrich said their poster has only been rejected once by one of the five billboard companies that they work with around the state. It carried the theme ‘I had fingerprints before I was born,’ she said, “and for some reason (the company) wouldn’t let us put that one up.”

In the early years, their posters featuring a drawing of a fetus in the womb were targeted by paint bombings and other types of vandalism. But that doesn’t occur as much today, she said.

And while the posters they purchase from Prolife Across AMERICA carry a positive focus on choosing life over abortion, Georgene Ulrich is not adverse to using graphic photos of aborted fetuses in certain situations outside the billboard effort, such as vigils held near college campuses by the group, “Show the Truth.”

“People say, ‘How can you stand to look at that, that’s so horrible,” she said. “Well, you know what, it should be horrible when people look at it – that is the reality.”

Among other pro-life activities, the Ulriches also are active in the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants, a group that stands witness and provides sidewalk counseling outside abortion clinics.

Asked what changes they’ve seen in the movement over the past 17 years, Georgene said they’re heartened to see many more people involved today.

 “At least in the two ministries that we’re in,” she said.  ““We’re putting up more and more billboards all the time.”