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Look. The rate of adoptees who go on to ruin their parents' lives and their own is high. It's much higher than polite society acknowledges, or many prospective adopters realize. Granted. But it's nowhere near 100%. For a considerable number of children, it's exactly the life-improving, beneficial change that adopters want to give, and it works out good-to-great. Many more sit in the middle, with adoption neither a massive mistake, nor a miraculous cure-all - those kids might never make anything much of themselves, but at least they got a happier childhood in the bargain, and the parents have nothing to regret even if they might, perhaps, have hoped for grander outcomes.
So yeah, the firefighter analogy still seems apt to me. If there's someone stuck on the top floor of a burning building, and I decide to go in there - I know there's a good chance, a really good chance, that we'll both die today and I'll have thrown my own life away "for nothing". But I'm going in anyway, because I also know there's a solid chance I'll save their life. Ideally I'll get them out without injury to either of us; more likely, they'll sustain some severe burns before I can get to them… but hey, it would still beat letting them die. Taking that gamble is what we call "being a hero". In the movies the life-or-death gamble always pays off. And that's a nice story. But celebrating and encouraging heroic behavior in the real world involves acknowledging that sometimes the dice are against you and you sacrifice yourself "for nothing", and that's just the way of it, and it doesn't make it worthless to try.
I don't see how you can possibly argue against this unless 1) you preposterously believe that an overwhelming majority of adoptions wind up net-negative for all involved, 2) you think even adoptions that don't blow up the parents' lives have a negligible positive impact on the children, or 3) you think improving the children's lives has no positive value and base the EV of adoption purely on the potential harm to the parents. 1) would be incredibly dumb and 3) would be skin-crawlingly evil. If it's 2), I'd like to see some solid evidence, because it'd be a pretty counterintuitive claim, what with the foster care system's track record being a massive horror story of its own.
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