Lawyer named adoption angel
Published: November 1, 2006
When Monica Farris Linkner and her husband adopted a son in 1988, they went to Kansas to do so.
That’s because at the time, people in Michigan could not work directly with their attorney and a birth mother to arrange an adoption.
The experience of adopting a child, and the knowledge that not everyone had the time, money or ability to go to another state to adopt, led Linkner to begin working on changing Michigan’s adoption laws.
“I became very passionate about adoption in general and about getting Michigan laws to be more adoption friendly,” said Linkner, an Ann Arbor lawyer.
Because of her work on adoption issues, this fall she was named an “Angel of Adoption” by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute, an organization composed of 196 members of Congress. Linkner was nominated for the honor by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and honored at a ceremony in Washington.
For Linkner, who also had a biological son 17 years before she adopted, the effort to change Michigan’s laws began about three years after her adopted son, Matt, was born.
Linkner, who lived in Lathrup Village in Oakland County at the time, contacted state Rep. David Gubow of Huntington Woods, who was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Gubow became interested and held hearings around the state, Linkner said. She testified at several of those hearings, wrote position papers, talked to legislators, and brought in experts to promote reform.
In 1994, the Legislature enacted a set of 17 bills that took effect in January 1995. The new laws allowed direct placement adoptions, meaning prospective parents, working with an attorney, could be chosen by a birth mother. The laws effectively reduced the time it took to adopt a child, from four to six years down to a year or 18 months. The laws allowed the birth mother and adoptive parents to decide on the degree of openness in the adoption, such as whether there would be any contact between the birth family and adoptive family.
“It allowed people to really fashion their adoptions more flexibly,” Linkner said. “At the time, birth mothers weren’t picking the adoptive families at all.”
The new laws also effectively forced adoption agencies, which had been the gatekeepers for adoption, to change their rigid practices and open up to the new ways of adoption, Linkner said.
Mark McDermott, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and adoption expert, came in to help Linkner with her reform campaign.
“As far as Michigan was concerned, (Linkner) was the primary person who spearheaded (the reform),” McDermott said.
Diane Michelsen, an adoption attorney in Lafayette, Calif., who has worked with Linkner on interstate adoptions and who also was named an “Angel of Adoption” this year, said Linkner brings many strong personal qualities to her work.
“She brings a caring from her heart and she brings broad-based legal insights and intellect,” Michelsen said. “She is persistent and clear thinking.”
Her adoption experience, and her work on adoption reform, changed not only Michigan law but also Linkner’s career. After the reform, she focused her law practice exclusively on adoption and assisted reproductive technology cases dealing with procedures such as surogacy, gestational carriers and embryo donors.
During the campaign for adoption reform, Linkner also helped form an adoption support group, the Family Tree, which lasted for about 10 years and involved about 125 people at its height.
Linkner, 58, was born and raised in Detroit. She graduated from Mumford High School in 1965, attended the University of Michigan for two years, then finished her bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Wayne State University in 1972.
She had been married and divorced and already had her first child when she entered law school at Wayne State University in 1974. Involved during her youth in the civil rights and women’s movements, she decided to go to law school after meeting a woman who was a lawyer.
“It never occurred to me that a woman could become a lawyer back then,” she said. “I met a woman lawyer and thought maybe I could be more effective working through the legal system to bring about social change than by carrying a picket sign.”
She says her parents, two aunts and the Jewish belief in “repairing the world” were responsible for her desire to help others.
Linkner moved to the Ann Arbor area in 2003; she lives in Webster Township.
Looking ahead, Linkner said Michigan still needs reform in the openness of adoption and access to adoption records. The state also needs a “putative father” registry where men who believe they are fathers of children and who want to claim parental rights would be required to register or give up those rights, she said. Such a registry would save much time now needed to track down putative fathers before adoptions take place, she said.
The state also needs to find a way to get more foster children into adoptive homes, she said.
Linkner said she is happy with her work and wants to continue it.
“I want to keep doing what I’m doing because I love it,” she said. “How many other people get to help put families together?”
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: