Adoption Center of San Diego

In May of 2015 I went into labor with my heart set on adoption, my daughter’s father was in agreement. After picking a couple my daughter’s father changed his mind and we decided to keep our child and parent. When we made that choice (which we were in the legal area to do so) I called Sarah and told her. She was NOT happy, I told her I had spoken with my family and had more support than I originally thought I had. Bottom line I was keeping my child and to cancel the adoption. She was pure evil with me and made me break down in tears, bringing up my past struggles with drugs, depression etc. She threw my past and my struggles in my face all at an attempt to shame me into going through with the adoption. She also said awful things about my mother and father of my child. At one point she shamed me for having depression so bad I had trouble in the past holding down a job, she called me selfish and lazy. Finally I told her flat out I’m done with the adoption process she made me call the adoptive parents and tell them I’d changed my mind, it was heartbreaking to let them down but ultimately I wanted to parent my child. I found her making me call the parents VERY unprofessional and down right wrong, I filed a complain with my social worker and the city of San Diego. Sarah makes a lot of money from adoptions and her goal when speaking to me was to shame me into continuing the adoption, she even called the adoptive parents and told them to go to the hospital. They showed up at the NICU demanding I come to the parking lot to talk and sent me threatening texts to the point I blocked Sarah and the prospective adopting parents from my phone. AVOID THIS PLACE, don’t share any of your flaws because if you do Sarah will turn on a dime. Truly awful experience from someone who claims to be a professional. My daughter is 3 months now and I don’t regret parenting I only regret trusting Sarah Jensen.

I placed my son through Sarah. She was amazing! She encouraged me, educated me, and was always there for me. I placed my son 16 years ago, and I’m still involved with him and his family. I would reccomend Sarah to anyone who asks! In fact I’m recommending her now!

not sure what to rate, I and my husband do want to have a happy story like other couple here.
reply from sarah was «We don’t take Gay couples as it take forever for the couple to adopt». on further asking if they have ever worked with gay couples they have not worked with any gay couple so not sure how is she getting her statistic from. On other hand if you see the adoption stats there is no difference in adoption time between straight vs gay couples.

As stated by others, read the filtered reviews. Many negative reviews are written by people with whom Sarah chose not to work, so you have to read their angry comments with that in mind. Sarah only works with about 20 couples at a time so that people aren’t waiting for years to adopt, so she is of course discerning and chooses to work with people she believes (based on 20+ years of experience) are going to be successful in the process. One factor is that your feelings about open adoption and your fertility; if you are not emotionally embracing adoption or have not confronted your fertility issues (if applicable), then you may not be a good candidate for open adoption. That’s a blunt truth that you should know before going into this experience.
Each adoption is so different and personal that I am going to stick with the basics of our experience with the ACSD:
–We waited 3 ½ months from the time we put in our application/​final paperwork till we were chosen and our daughter was born.
–It took us about 3 – 4 months to do all of the paperwork, write our «dear birthmother» letter, and have our pre-​adoption meetings with Sarah. We do not include this in our waiting time, as you can move as slow or as fast as you want, and until all this paperwork is done, you’re not in the «waiting pool.»
–The average wait through ACSD is approximately 9 months. We have met a few people who have waited 2 years and a few who have waited 1 – 3 months. Most of our friends through the center waited about 6 – 9 months before being chosen and/​or having their baby born.
–Our daughter was born completely healthy and not exposed to drugs or alcohol. Reviews stating that Sarah told couples that all the babies have been exposed seem totally false in my experience. Sarah told us that birth moms are usually very honest if there is drug/​alcohol exposure, and that seems to be true from what we’ve witnessed. Of all the babies we’ve met over the last two years, very few have had these types of exposures. Just because a woman inadvertently gets pregnant does not mean she’s a drug addict.
–My advice is to be honest with yourselves about what you are wiling to take on, and be ready for anything to be thrown at you.
–We had 5 days to prepare before our daughter was born. Like I said, be ready for anything.
–Because adoption was our first choice for starting our family, we skipped the counseling portion of Sarah’s services; if you are struggling with your fertility, there is counseling offered. During this time, Sarah might tell you that you don’t seem ready to adopt.
–You do have to pay for the orientation and counseling meetings before being accepted. This does feel like nickel-​and-​diming. But all your $ goes to helping counsel birth parents, so keep that in mind.
–We do feel that Sarah and her team can be more empathetic towards the birth mom/​birth family rather than the adoptive parents. And you know what? We’re OK with that. As difficult and emotional as this process was for us, it was 10x more so for our daughter’s birth mom. You have to understand that and put yourselves in the birth parents’ shoes to really have a successful and healthy relationship with the birth family.
–During our short wait, we were matched with another couple who were looking to place their 9-​month-​old son with us. Without going into too much personal detail, this match fell through twice and was a pretty awful experience for us. I just want to be honest here. It was horrible. During this time, we did not feel supported by ACSD because they do not typically do «older child» (non-​newborn) adoptions and kind of left us to our own devices for the transition. Because of what happened with us, they have since changed their policies regarding non-​newborn adoptions. However, I would personally recommend newborn-​only adoptions through this particular agency, based on what we went through.
–I would still give ACSD 5 stars, though, because we did feel much more supported during the adoption of our daughter, just 4 weeks after our failed match. Sarah was loving and helpful to both us and to our daughter’s birth mom. She visited at the hospital and helped our daughter’s birth mom through the group counseling she offers. In the end, we ended up being able to parent a beautiful, healthy, smart little girl, which was only made possible by Sarah and her organization.
–Once you’re part of the ACSD family, it is wonderful to attend the holiday parties and summer picnics. It’s a nice way to catch up with other adoptive families and birth families and to foster an excitement about adoption for your children. It shows how much Sarah cares about her families, too– both adoptive and birth.
So there are some tips that I hope are helpful to you before beginning this process and/​or choosing ACSD!

What an amazing experience! A team of professionals who know what they are doing, and do their best to make all parties comfortable and understand the experience to the best of their ability. One thing that we loved about our experience with ACSD was how our birth mother was always put first. Anybody who complains about that shouldn’t be adopting in the first place. We went to another agency’s orientation and it was nowhere near as personal and engaging as what Sara has going on at Adoption Center of San Diego. If you are ready for inviting a birth mother and baby into your life, I highly recommend getting involved and having an open adoption through ACSD and Sara.

For anyone that has had the opportunity to work with Sarah and her staff, they will know the amount of time, support, coaching, education, and love that goes into the adoption process. My family and I have had the amazing pleasure of working with the Adoption Center of San Diego and can’t say enough great things about this organization, and the process we went through to be blessed with our son.
Sarah spent a lot of time with us, educating us about what «open adoption» means, and how as a family, we can embrace this beautiful gift. The monthly support groups not only for the adoptive parents, but also for the birth mothers shows the type of dedication and love Sarah has for her job.
I could never imagine anyone giving her or her organization a bad rating because if they really worked with her and embraced the process, they wouldn’t have anything but wonderful things to say. Adoption is difficult. It’s emotional, sad, often times happy, and sometimes frustrating. But Sarah, and her staff helped us get through all of these emotions. She helped us at every step of the process from assisting with the «Dear Birthmother letter,» to guiding us through the legal process, to helping us with our tax credits, to providing education sessions on how to speak to our child about adoption, to hosting large parties two times a year for all the adoptive and birth families. The list goes on and on and I am so thankful and blessed to have experienced adoption the way Sarah has showed us.
Thank you Sarah and Adoption Center staff or making this a process that will forever be in our hearts. Your devotion, dedication, and love for all of us shows through in all the good deeds you do to bind families together. Thank you for making our dreams come true.

If you thinking about adopting, i would encourage you to scroll down and look at the reviews that get filtered out. Unilocal uses an automated filtering system that it claims to keep our fake reviews. They admit this is an imperfect system:
As a long time Unilocaler (been doing this several years) I am not a fan of this filtering system. Not only do you have to scroll down and click on the filtered reviews but then you have to type in one of those «CAPTCHA» codes to see the page – it says it’s too make sure you are real but why do they care if robots can see these filtered out reviews? It makes no sense.
ANYWAYS, most of the filtered reviews for the Adoption Center are good ones and they are from real people. The problem is, the auto filter tends to filter out people who only write one review or who don’t have a lot of « Unilocal friends». So I encourage people to check out other sites as well to get a balanced view, in particular you should check out their facebook page:
None of this is to discount the negative reviews or your own good judgment. I have not discussed those negative ones nor am I trying to mediate that process; as an adoptive parent myself I just want you to make an informed decision and get the full picture of the great work Sarah does.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Sarah, the director is my mother in law. I haven’t, however, run this by her nor do I pretend to speak for her. All opinions and information below are completely my own.
My darling wife and I started the adoption process with the Adoption Center after suffering through two miscarriages the previous year. Macee, the beautiful baby girl that we ended up adopting didn’t actually come from any of Sarah’s birth moms (we ended up connecting with her through a different serendipitous series of events… but that’s a whole other story:) but we went through the beginning process with Sarah and had a great experience.
We went through the orientation and application process and Sarah was up front with the other prospective adoptive parents as to our relationship with her.
THE PROCESS:
The Adoption Center does OPEN ADOPTIONS. Basically, this means that the adoptive parents and birthmoms maintain some level of communication and periodic meetings/​hangouts. Beyond that, open adoptions are really about an attitude of appreciation for the birthmoms’ sacrifice and love and a DECISION to incorporate the birthmom into the lives of their son or daughter. Open adoptions aren’t for everyone, just as adoptions aren’t for everyone. If open adoptions aren’t your thing, there are agencies that do closed adoptions but these (as I understand) are getting more rare.
The way Sarah does the matching: it’s up to the birth moms. Adoptive parents write a letter introducing themselves to a birthmom (includes a pic or two). The birthmom gets a stack of letters/​applications from the prospective parents and picks a potential adoptive couple that way. From this point, they usually speak on the phone or meet and from there the process continues. Thus we made sure we were not given any unfair advantage. The birthmoms were not informed of our familial relationship with Sarah so they could chose impartially (even though we didn’t end up getting matched).
ADDITIONALLY
My wife grew up attending the great events that Sarah puts on for adoptive families and birthmoms. She usually does two events/​picnics a year I believe. These are events where the birthmoms and past adoptive parents get together in celebration and appreciation. It’s pretty cool to see kids that are now in college hanging out with both their parents and birthmoms.
What is clear is that Sarah has a deep love for adoptive parents and birthmom – this is evidenced by the hundreds of families she has helped during a LIFETIME dedicated to the adoption process.

I would give Sarah no stars if I could. She said downright hurtful and mean things to prospective parents such as «you are crazy if you think you are going to adopt a child untouched by drugs» and «why shouldn’t the birthmother ask for money, IT’S HER BABY». I saw some pictures of the babies up for adoption. One of them looked mentally retarded. Most of the birth mothers looked like trailer trash. Sarah deals with some unsavory birth parents — you are better off finding an adoption agency owner who didn’t keep her own unplanned pregnancy as Sarah did. What does she know about the pain infertile couples go through? She clearly sympathizes with her trailer trash clients and when your birthmother changes her mind at the 11^th hour, believe me, Sarah is NOT going to be in YOUR corner. If adoption is too difficult consider embryo adoption and/​or surrogacy. Genetic parents have never tried to claim the baby born of an embryo adoption.

Hard time deciding between two or three stars Adoption Center of San Diego.
Sarah Jensen is the director and I believe her heart is in the right place. She doesn’t work with too many couples at one time, so the typical wait time is only 12 months – pretty awesome for a domestic newborn adoption.
But… neither my husband or I got the warm fuzzies from her. We felt she was a bit short with us, a bit harsh. I had a lengthy list of questions and when they weren’t answered in the orientation, I let her know that I’d be emailing/​calling within the next couple days. I emailed the list to her and she called to discuss them. I wasn’t home so she left a message with my husband. She was very insistent with him and later with me that she had covered all my questions in the orientation. Ummm… not to my satisfaction she hadn’t. She apologized that she hadn’t answered them fully, but honestly? She was rude about it. It certainly didn’t feel like a heartfelt apology.
Before she accepts you as a client, you have to go to a 3-​hour orientation. (BTW, it costs $ 100.) Afterward, you can fill out a form telling her a few details about you, your spouse, your marriage and what you are looking for in adoption. Once she reads that, she’ll let you know if she’s willing to work with you.
My husband and I got a big, fat refusal. I can respect that. She has 20 years of experience and knows who she can best help. But here’s what upset me… First of all, when I didn’t hear back from her within couple days after faxing in the form, I emailed her. She emailed me back to tell me she didn’t want to work with us. I think a phone call would have been much more professional. I responded to the email, asking why and could she please refer us to other agencies. (In the orientation, she said that if she couldn’t help a couple, she’d give them other suggestions.) She did not reply back. Not only is that unprofessional, but it’s rude.
If you’re looking to adopt, I definitely recommend that you go to the Adoption Center’s orientation. It might be the right agency for you. But I wanted to share my 2 cents…

We were extremely happy with how this agency worked with us. I would and have recommended it to others. They are professional, compassionate, communicative and above all, well connected. Even after adopting our child three years ago, we are still in contact with Sara (the gal in charge). She does such an amazing job keeping us in the loop by having numerous functions throughout the year for us and the birth-​families to attend. They offer a great support group for «parents to be» and pregnant moms. I have nothing but great things to say about the Adoption Center of San Diego. I wish I could share my email address to answer any ones questions or concerns they may have about this process… but with that being said, Sara could do the same and get you started in the «right direction».
I highly recommend using this agency if you are interested in Adoption. What a great way to start the Adoption process :)

I first learned about ACSD when I was about 7 months pregnant and not in a ideal situation to raise a child. I was nervous about meeting with the director, Sarah, initially because I had no idea what to expect. From the moment Sarah met with me to discuss my situation, she mirrored the values and ethics ACSD offers with sincerity and love. In retrospect, there was nothing about my experience with Sara and ACSD that I would change. Everything from the timely communication and support groups helped validated the life changing decision I made for my son. I speak highly of this organization anytime my decision to do adoption is discussed. The experience with ACSD was overall amazing, loving, supportive, flexible, basically perfect. I’d recommend the agency to anyone considering adoption as a birth parent or a means to have children. From the bottom of my heart, thank you :)

Beware… if you are over the age of 45, Adoption Center of San Diego is not for you!!!
We paid $ 75 to attend an orientation in the Fall of ’09. We spoke to Sarah Jensen, the director and asked if my age (I’m 49, my husband is 39) would be an issue. She said she’d review our paperwork and get back to us. It never happened. Never heard a word.
Fast forward, to April of 2010, a friend, who had worked with Sarah sucessfully, encouraged me to call her. «Make her tell you that she won’t work with you» he said. I placed a phone call and never heard back from her. Only this week, after sending her a polite but unhappy email do I hear from her.
I got what felt like a nonsense explanation for why we hadn’t heard from her, and then a hem and haw explanation that they are choosing the couples they work with more carefully since they are overwhelmed with families wanting to adopt. Said that it was heartbreaking, for her, to watch couples not get matched, who were over 45.
Basically– she doesn’t want to bother with couples over 45. She never would come right out and say she wouldn’t work with us… but she sure did a dance around answering my direct question about it.
Bottom line, she can choose whoever she wants to work with, but she should be upfront about, and not take $ 75 and then blow you off. Oh, and if you happend to call and ask her about my review, she also said the short timewe’ve been married was a factor– yeah– well we’ve been married for nearly 4 years, and together for 11 years!!! Not a short term relationship.
Good luck adoptive parents. It’s a tough road out there…