It's been more than 10 months since Annette Driver, of Jefferson City, and Aileen Woods, of St. Louis, "found" each other.
Driver, 58, had spent years searching for her daughter, whom she had given up for adoption when the girl was born and Driver was 19.
And Woods, 38, also had been searching a long time for her birth-mother.
So, count Driver - whose jobs include lobbying Missouri lawmakers - among the people excited the House, on a 125-28 vote, last week sent the Senate a bill making it easier for many adults to get their original birth certificates.
"We're hoping everything will continue to move smoothly," she said Friday as she headed to St. Louis to visit her grandson. "We think it's a good bill that everybody can live with, and it certainly makes progress for the adoption issue."
Rep. Don Phillips, R-Kimberling City, sponsored the bill and said he's "beyond pleased" the House passed the bill Thursday.
"This is something that's never happened before - and the subject of adoption just throws red flags up, for some reason," Phillips explained. "It's an emotional topic. It's a personal thing.
"And, frankly, (many people) just don't understand it. They just don't get it."
Driver agreed with that feeling, saying "most of the people making the decisions behind this law - the legislators - are not adoptees or birth parents and really don't understand the true issue."
Heather Dodd also agreed.
She's not an adoptee, but is seen as a "search angel" by many adoptees and their families.
Just getting the bill through the House has "been a pretty difficult process because it's so complex," Dodd said. "It takes a pretty good effort to educate everybody on what exactly it is that is broken about the system that we're needing to have fixed."
Dodd said "even the explanation is pretty complicated" for "a lot of people if they're not involved in the whole process or if they're not familiar with the rights of an adopted person."
State Rep. Jay Barnes, R-Jefferson City, voted against final passage of the bill last week.
"I feel for adoptees who want to know who their natural parents are," Barnes said via email. "In the past, I've sponsored legislation to make it easier for them to find out.
"However, I voted against House Bill 1599 because it would open adoption records that the natural parents were told would remain closed forever at the time they consented to the adoption."
The Missouri Catholic Conference has taken the same position.
General Counsel Tyler McClay said last month that Catholic Charities, associated with the Foster Care and Adoption Coalition, feels the bill is "retrospective in application" because birth mothers were assured the confidentiality of their identities.
The U.S. Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws - laws that change the legality of something that has already happened.
Missouri's Constitution does the same thing, and it also prohibits the state from passing laws that are retrospective in their application.
Barnes said, "The bill has an ex post facto effect that upsets the expectations of Missourians who made these decisions in the past. I do not believe that's a good idea."
However, Phillips - an adoptee - said his research shows Missouri didn't make adoptions a closed system until 1941.
"And in the mid-80s, they made it retroactive," Phillips said. "That doesn't seem like a fair way to do business.
"Who are we breaking a promise to? The child?"
Driver said Phillips' bill offers a compromise.
An adoptee would have to be at least 18 before they could request a copy of the original birth certificate.
They also would have to have been born in Missouri, because the law only affects the state registrar in the Health and Human Services department.
Once the request is made, the state would contact the birth parents and give them a consent form.
"(It) allows the birth parent to either agree to consent or give consent to a mediary to be a part of it or to say, "No, I don't want contact,'" Driver said.
Phillips added, the birth parent cannot ignore the request.
"It's the responsibility of that birth parent to fill out that contact-preference form," he explained. "It's not the state's responsibility.
"Let's say a woman was raped, and she desperately wants to be left alone. She can fill out that contact preference form, and the state will honor that until her death.
"If she ignores it, then - after an eight-month waiting period - the state will go ahead and issue that (original) birth certificate."
The law says if a birth parent doesn't want to be contacted, his or her name can be redacted from the copy of the original birth certificate.
The law also specifies when an adoptee gets a copy of the original birth certificate, the document is marked: "For genealogical purposes only - not to be used for establishing identity."
The law also requires the applicant provide appropriate proof of identification to the state registrar.
That, Dodd said, is because the state's birth records can be cross-tracked with adoption records because the state issues a modified birth certificate after the adoption is completed.
However, without this law, current state law doesn't let either the adoptee or birth parent seek that information.
Phillips said he didn't start searching for his birth parents until he was 47, and his adopted parents had died.
His own search was caused by curiosity about his medical background and not any unhappiness that he had been adopted.
"I had a wonderful life," he said of his childhood and his relationship with the only parents he had known.
However, he sponsored the bill because one of his Southwest Missouri constituents, "a 75 year-old great-grandmother ... came to me and said, "The state will not give me a copy of my original birth certificate.'"
Phillips said the woman "had outlived both of her birth parents - but one of the requirements is that both of the birth parents sign off, and they were dead.
"In order for her to get it, it would take a judge to give her a court order, and frankly, the judges don't want to do that, because that would start a precedent."
That would change if his bill becomes law.
Driver said some consider it a "civil rights issue. ... They feel it's against their civil rights to have that particular piece of documentation (withheld)."
Dodd wants the state Senate to understand how hard people have been working to get the proposed law to this point.
"It really boils down to (adoptees) feel like they're not being treated the same," she said, "when every other person can access" their original birth records.
Dodd also plans to keep working to convince more lawmakers "the laws we have are ... antiquated (and) we need a solution rather than just cry about the (current) laws being" unfair.
Related story: Adoption advocates plead for birth certificate access