Do you think adoption is a crapshoot?

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I believe in this wholeheartedly. Sure, there are plenty of good adoptive parents out there, but for every good adoptive parent, there are quite a few bad apples. There have been many unfortunate cases of adoptive parents abandoning, abusing, or outright killing the children they're legally obligated to raise for really petty and stupid reasons.

This is kind of a response to Houseday's thread here:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt245394.html

Being born is a crapshoot.

Being raised by natural parents is a crapshoot.

Being adopted might be even more of a crapshoot, or not.

Raising children is a crapshoot. For every bad adoptive parents, there are a two-digit number of good ones; this is at least the case here, in Europe. There are strict requirements here to even be taken into consideration as an adoptive parent.

Dude, you just admitted that some adoptive parents aren't actually the devil. Awesome! That's some real progress right there.

What part of life isn't a crapshoot?

The problem is, people do not understand developmental stages.

Parents of all kinds, adoptive or biological, would benefit from being offered the opportunity to learn the basics of child development before having their first. Sadly, they miss out on this opportunity and they go into it not knowing anything, with only the myths of their parents and dysfunction of their own upbringings to guide them. Truly tragic.

At a stab I'd say that adoptive parents are probably more likely to be good parents than biological ones, if only because they have to go through very rigorous checks (at-least they do here in the UK) before being accepted for adoption, rather than just putting the thing in the other thing one time. Of course though, all parenting is a crapshoot to an extent and you can never predict what'll happen.

It's no more of less a crapshoot than biological parents. You just do the best you can.

Actually, adoptive parents demonstrate similar or higher levels of parental investment in adopted children compared to biological children according to two recent (2007 & 2009) studies (at least in the US).

Sources:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/abo ... lement.pdf
http://kylegibson.squarespace.com/stora ... eholds.pdf

No more so than having a baby yourself. You never know what you are gonna get.

There are bad parents, both adoptive and biological. And there are also good parents, both adoptive and biological.

As a writer, I've considered creating a story about adoption, but nothing's come to mind. The problem I have with writing an adoption story is that I can't decide what tone I'm going for. I don't even know the genre.