The process of adoption for the prospective parents includes a lot of up-front time in reading, research, preparation: tons of decisions and thinking before you even submit applications and/or get a referral. Part of the process is selecting an adoption agency. How do you choose? Here are some questions you should ask any adoption agency you are considering during your selection process. For international adoption, add these questions to your checklist. If you are adopting from another country, you must decide how you are doing to deal with photolistings. Here are some reasons why David believes photolistings are not ethical:

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. A family that is desperate to parent and adopt easily bonds with the right photo and becomes hooked and blinded.

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.

If you are going to use photolistings, here are guidelines for ethical photolistings. The web site/agency listing photos should follow them; otherwise, you might want to think twice about using that agency and/or photo.

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.

Remember, if you did more research the last time you bought a new car, a new suit, or house, you haven't done enough research about adoption.