Weird twist of fate reunites adopted twin sisters

By DAVID USBORNE in New York

Fate determined early on that twin girls born in a Mexico hospital 20 years ago would not grow up together, know each other or even realise that one another existed.

But fate, as both the girls have recently discovered, can change its mind. How else can you explain the twist in the lives of Tamara Rabi and Adriana Scott?

When they were given away for adoption as babies to two sets of parents in the United States, the chances of their ever meeting were surely remote.

But there was one early coincidence - both adoptive families lived in the same region.

Tamara grew up with Jewish parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Adriana was raised a Catholic in a Long Island suburb of the city. Yet there was nothing to say that their paths would ever cross.

But when Tamara entered a university on Long Island last northern autumn, something odd started to happen. People she had never met claimed to know her. Confusion began to give way to astonishment when a friend told her that he knew someone so similar to her they had to be sisters. Her name was Adriana.

The story of discovery that followed, reported in detail by the New York Times yesterday, is the stuff of fairytales and provides the kind of material that behavioural psychologists interested in the nurture-versus-nature debate of personality development dream about.

The internet provided the venue for the first tentative approaches by Tamara to the sister she didn't even know existed. They exchanged snippets of information. It turned out they were indeed both adopted and were exactly the same height.

Then "the picture came up and our jaws just dropped", recalled Christie Lothrop, a friend of Tamara's who watched over her shoulder as that first internet conversation played out.

Since then, the girls have become friends as they have shared a journey of mutual self-recognition that has been wondrous and disturbing at the same time. They share eating habits, verbal traits as well as an ability to dance. Uncannily, both their adoptive fathers died of cancer.

Adriana's mother, Diane Scott, had known her baby had a twin but had never told her daughter. And she had never had any idea how to track her down.

As for Tamara's mother, she remained sceptical until the afternoon her daughter came into her apartment accompanied by Adriana.

"It was just incredible," Judy Rabi told the Times. "You just blink your eyes and say, 'This can't be real'."

- INDEPENDENT