Group Runs Ad in Custody Battle : Families: Sherman Oaks woman and friends implore Iowa couple they don’t know to allow their daughter to stay with her adoptive parents.

A Sherman Oaks mother and nine friends from as far away as New York pooled $1,179.99 to run a quarter-page newspaper ad Friday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, asking the biological parents of a 2-year-old girl to give up their battle for custody of her.

The ad, on the state page of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, is in the form of a letter asking Daniel and Cara Schmidt of Blairstown in eastern Iowa to let their daughter come to them on her own terms.

“And then when she does come to you, she will know you for who you really are: two parents who sacrificed everything for her happiness,” the ad says.

Sonja Eddings Brown, 34, of Sherman Oaks said she and her friends do not know the Schmidts or Jan and Roberta DeBoer of Ann Arbor, Mich., who have raised the toddler, named Jessica, since she was just weeks old.

But Brown and a friend from Salt Lake City felt compelled to act when they heard of the adoption tug-of-war on a television newsmagazine show, which detailed how the DeBoers have been ordered to return Jessica to her biological parents.

“It just seemed so wrong to me that you can take a 2-year-old and make her pay for the mistakes of her biological parents,” said Brown, a composer who put $300 garnered from a recent job into the advertisement kitty. “Sometimes in your life there just finally comes a story like that where instead of feeling powerless . . . you think, ‘This time there’s something I can do.’ ”

Brown, a mother of two, and her Utah friend, Christine L. Barnhurst, then called other friends with children and decided to take out the ad, which Brown wrote and hopes to run again next week.

“Chris and I just thought that we can write a letter and make an appeal to them on a conciliatory level . . . and put it in a way that wasn’t an attack,” Brown said.

The ad implores: “Please, please, don’t ask a two-year-old to choose you over the only mom and dad she has ever loved.”

The custody battle between the Schmidts and the DeBoers began weeks after Cara Schmidt gave the baby up for adoption in February, 1991. She named another man as the father and signed away her parental rights, and the DeBoers began adoption proceedings. Cara Schmidt later informed Dan Schmidt he was the father, and he began a court battle to gain custody, claiming he had never relinquished his parental rights.

Three Iowa courts upheld Schmidt’s right to his child.

A Michigan court’s decision that it would be in the child’s best interest to stay with the DeBoers was overturned by the Michigan Court of Appeals, and the DeBoers plan an appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court.

“Everybody keeps saying we’re going to have to change the laws, but nothing can be done for this child,” Brown said. “But I’m saying we have to draw a line in the sand in front of Jessica DeBoer.”

Other groups that have called for the Schmidts to give up their battle include Justice for Jessica of Indianola, Iowa. Lorrie Wood of Indianola and a friend formed their group, began a letter-writing campaign to the Michigan Supreme Court and held a rally Sunday at the Statehouse in Des Moines, attended by about 350 people.

Other groups scheduled rallies in Cedar Rapids and Ann Arbor.