I have just come across something that has brought an extra furrow or two to my already worried brow, and I would like to trot it out here and ask if my concern appears to others to be warranted.

From the president of Origins USA, Bernadette Wright, with a "please forward far and wide!" message as a header, it's a call for stories for People Magazine "seeking recent victims of unethical adoptions", with a deadline for updates of today, the 7th of November.

Although I understand Ms. Wright's hope that this "could be a great opportunity to increase public awareness of coercive and exploitative adoption practices", I can't help but question such enthusiastic urgings to participate in so serious a conversation in so inappropriate a forum.

People Magazine?

Is People Magazine suddenly a venerable bastion of serious journalism? An example of well-balanced, perceptive, intelligent and educated thought? Do people turn to People for moral guidance? As a touchstone for ethics?

She is also interested in talking with people who adopted (either domestically or internationally) and later discovered that the child they adopted had been obtained by kidnapping or coercion.

Gee. No kidding. No agenda there ...

This is a bloodbath in the making, a premeditated move to magazine-selling mayhem of the first order, and voluntary participation would seem to be nothing more than the print version of jumping into a Jerry Springer-like trash-fest complete with photos.

Any guesses on photos, by the way? Will there be an Angelina shot? Madonna, perhaps? Ellen Degeneres's dog? Will celebrity gossip play any part in this very, very serious story?

Perhaps I'm jumping the gun here. Maybe since I left the sunny shores of California People Magazine has shed its image of glossy celeb-hugging perpetuator of all things shallow and meaningless and has taken on a mantle of well-respected journalistic integrity and become an apparatus for social change through perspicacious discourse.

And perhaps Michael Jackson has developed an unquenchable lust for 40-year-old women.

Of course, if you have an adoption story that involves alien abduction or a child fathered by Brad Pitt, you might be better off saving your tale for a tabloid and get paid thousands for it.

Word to the wise, as if anyone wise would actually consider involvement in the far-too-obvious ploy for cheap entertainment: what you say to People Mag may end up having very little to do with what appears between its pages, and fifteen minutes of some sorts of fame are really not worth it.