Helping real children sounds like a lot of thankless work, you know? All the effort of researching and caring about the facts, so you know where the effort is really needed. All the potential disappointment if you can’t get more than slow, incremental change — or if you don’t see the underlying societal problems changing at all. Sounds upsetting. Can’t have that.

Also, quite seriously, there is a very real problem of adoptive parents abusing their children that they "saved" because it was never really about helping kids - it was about the image of themselves as Good People, and when the real children fail to live up to their expectations and perform gratitude slavishly enough, the adoptive parents can't deal and don't really want to try.

There is a nonzero overlap between the sort of people who are likely to try this form of adoption to save children and the sort of people who are likely to buy into this particular web of conspiracy theories.