Then, in 1997, Stonum read of a drive initiated by local adoptees to enact a law giving them access to Oregon birth records. She joined the effort, helping gather 94,000 signatures. Voters approved the law in 1998, but it stalled in the courts for 18 months as six birth mothers fought to protect their anonymity. Stonum worried that she'd never find her mother. "It was like everyone who was adopted was turned into a vicious animal out to stalk their birth mothers," she says.
But on May 30, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the nation's first voter-approved adoption law to take effect. (Kansas, Alaska and Alabama permit full access to birth records, and Delaware and Tennessee have limited access, but their legislation was not put to a vote.)
"You can't understand any story until you know your own," says Helen Hill, 45, an art teacher and adoptee who spearheaded the 1997 drive—and received death threats as a result. Still, the issue is controversial. "It's unfair for birth mothers to be subjected to this kind of invasion," says lawyer Franklin Hunsaker, 58, who represented the six women. "They feel the rug is being pulled out from under them."
A week after the law took effect, Stonum's birth certificate arrived, bearing her mother's name: Sylvia Montana Sutherland. After making little progress searching for Sutherland, Stonum, determined yet fearful ("I thought, 'What if she hates me?' " she recalls), contacted the Oregon Adoptive Rights Association, a group that tracks marriage and death certificates from several states. Within 20 minutes she learned that her mother, now Sylvia DuChien, was living in Independence, Ore., 65 miles away. She also got a phone number. The next night, June 21, Stonum called. "I hate to say this. I want to do it real gentle," she told DuChien. "Did you have a baby on November 15, '58?"
"Yes," replied DuChien, now 65.
"That was me," said Stonum.
"I've really been praying about this," said DuChien, who has three other grown children.
The two women hastily caught up, as DuChien explained she got pregnant after only one date with Stonum's father (DuChien claims not to remember his name). DuChien . chose adoption over abortion, arranging it through her doctor. He turned to Eugene Vanelli, a human-resources manager for a steel mill who died in 1992, and his wife, Vivian, 73, who had adopted a baby boy two years earlier. DuChien never saw her daughter. "If I had seen her," she says, "I couldn't have gone through with it."
Stonum acknowledges that she and her adoptive brother Martin, now 44, grew up in "a really loving family." In 1979, she married her high school sweetheart, Fred Stonum, a telephone worker, and had two children, Travis, now 21, and Sara, 17. But after they divorced in 1983, Stonum raised her children alone while working as a crisis counselor.
With the encouragement of her children, Stonum arranged to meet her birth mother at a July reunion. But on June 29, DuChien, her husband, Paul, 67, a retired TV-repair-shop owner, and their granddaughter Chelsea, 7, pulled up at Stonum's home. "I couldn't wait," DuChien said after hugging Stonum and sharing tears. They discovered they had the same gray-blue eyes, the same chin and smile.
Later, Vivian Vanelli came by, and DuChien thanked her for taking care of Stonum. "I think [the reunion] has given her peace," Vanelli says of her daughter. Days later, Stonum met half-sisters Sherri Chamness, 40, and Linda Evans, 32, and half-brother Mike Evans, 46. "It's like I've known her all my life," says Mike. "She's such a neat lady."
Stonum is just as taken with her newfound relations. "It didn't feel like a bunch of strangers," she adds. "I felt like I always belonged there."
Nick Charles
Alexandra Hardy in Portland
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Saved by the Bell Reunion
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