I must add that I think the point about no pregnancy hormones making it harder to bond is a fair one (it was allying it with how some adopters just aren't prepared for parenthood which I suspect got peoples backs up - like birth parents get extensive parenting classes before getting pregnant!)
I'm not sure if you're still reading OP but I was "lucky" to adopt a very small child/baby who was very very premature so it was like adopting a 5 month old. He really wasn't capable of much (couldn't sit up at 11 months) except ignoring me. It took weeks to bribe him into even making eye contact, I may as well not have been there. He would only sit on my lap as long as he was facing away. I had nearly 2 months of visiting him daily for about 4 hours a day before he came home with me. IN the UK you get 1 week (possibly 2) of visiting leading up to the child/children moving in.
I (and you when you gave birth) were dealing with a child which stayed where they were put and didn't talk, shout, destroy anything - and only one of them and in my case without the benefit of hormones.
Over time DS and I bonded and at some mysterious point in the first six months I fell headlong in love with him and of course as the cliche goes I would die for him. To be honest, there are any number of people I'd die for if push came to shove but he is the only person I would kill for. People hurting my baby (he's 11 now!) bring me to a murderous rage and if anyone seriously harmed him I can only imagine what I'd be capable of.
I felt this way about him long before any challenges came to light,because there was time and space for us. I think the same is true for many parents of children with additional needs, their difference is not so obvious sometimes when they're very tiny and as they grow your parenting grows with them and adapts to them (which is why I was a bit scathing earlier of the person who suggested things would be better if we took advice from birth parents).
Ds is a joy and his challenges are manageable and overcomeable and I have still been warned that the teenage years might be a whole new wave of challenging.
Bigmac said upthread "One of the MANY positive things about being adopted has meant, for us personally, we are less judgemental."
That resonated with me so much. It is so true. Someone asked me after adopting 3 years after the starting the process (and lets not bother counting the failed attempted at a pregnancy before that!) "How is being a mother different to what you were expecting?"
"I'm NOTHING like as good a parent as I was expecting to be"
Adoptive parents aren;t a different species to other parents, we are the same flawed collection of people just trying to do our best by our children. We are not all perfect, indeed some of us are outright inadequate. But in my experience birth parents who cannot cope with their children when they have additional needs are given help and encouragement and support if they are trying/have tried their best whereas adopters are generally judged by people who haven't walked in their shoes as an outrage.
I always tried to remember that these children have been failed firstly and primarily by their birth parents (possibly for understandable reasons), then who knows after that foster carers aren't always great (one set of siblings I know were abused by their foster carers), multiple foster carers, social services - who knows. Their adoptive parents are the first people to say - we will do this, we can do this, permanently, we can take on the failures of these people and make it as right as possible. They give up work and social contact and put up with people judging their parenting and their children's behaviour. They invested themselves for the hope of a future which is now gone. There are no happy ending for anyone if this adoption disrupts.
I can't imagine the depths of their despair at having failed at this unless they are unfeeling monsters. And whilst I agree that not all adoptive parents are up to the unequal task that society expects of them, you'd have to be an oscar winning actor to get through the adoption process without someone spotting that you're a sociopath, so I can only assume they're not.