THE ADOPTION AGENCY CHECKLIST A Proposal for Ethical Photolistings I apologize in advance to all those who successfully used photolistings on the Internet to provide an orphan with a home and family, but all too often, a successful Internet adoption story is interchangeable with a successful Internet used car purchase. What bothers me is how some adoption professionals are using the photolisting capability of the Internet to market and merchandise children. These photolistings can easily become a tool of the unscrupulous and unethical to victimize children and adoptive families. Stories about unavailable children being photolisted (bait and switch), children being listed with more than one agency and the same children being offered to more than one family abound thanks to photolistings. A family that is desperate to parent and adopt easily bonds with the right photo and becomes hooked and blinded. It is for these reasons that I am categorically opposed to photolistings. All too often, I am asked about a particular agency, frequently a disreputable one, because the propsective adoptive family was drawn to the photo of a child that the agency had posted on the Internet. I have to tell these families that a good agency should lead them to a child. A photo of a child should not lead them to the agency. They should be shopping for agencies, not children. While it appears that, for better or worse, Internet photolistings of children are here to stay, I'd like to offer the following proposal of guidelines for ethical photolistings: 1. They should make every reasonable effort to fully protect the full identity, privacy and specific location of both the listed child and that child's biological family. 2. They should be accessible only to immediate family members of prospective adoptive parents (PAP's), who have a completed and approved homestudy, via a password protected, secure site or similar secure access method. The PAP's who are given access to the photolisting page(s) should understand that giving access to unauthorized persons outside their immediate family should be prohibited and should result in loss of access to the photolistings. 3. Photolistings where the same child or children are listed by more than one agency or other placement service should be prohibited. 4. Any type of photolisting that is deemed to be advertising, marketing and/or brokering children, or that encourages PAP's to engage in "shopping" for a child, should be prohibited. 5. Photolistings that conceal, mislead or otherwise give false information about a child's background, medical, psychological or other pertinent information should be prohibited. 6. Any site that charges PAP's a fee to view photolistings should be prohibited. As ususal, I'm open for feedback and suggestions on the above proposal. Take care. David