Doing It For the Children

Adam Smith would probably be chuckling...

A Web-based casino that likes to bid on weird stuff - like paying parents to name their baby after the company - was the (in retrospect, predictable) winner of a Langhorne woman's online auction to sell ad space on her newborn.

So for the month of July, Michele Hutchison will clothe her second child, Devon, due to arrive via cesarean section Tuesday, in logoed baby togs provided by GoldenPalace.com. Company representatives have already PayPal'ed her $999 and discussed clothing styles, Hutchison said.

Hutchison and her husband, John, will get a supply of bibs, onesies and other stuff, and GoldenPalace.com will get another wave of publicity, and a likely spike in Web-page hits, like the one that followed previous publicity stunts, such as paying a Connecticut mom $15,000 to name her baby "GoldenPalace.com Benedetto." (She's known as Goldie.)

The company has also successfully bid $10,000 to buy the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich (surely you've heard of it) and bought advertising on a woman's cleavage, both offered on eBay.

Yesterday morning, meanwhile, with news reports of her eBay auction reaching Scotland and South Africa, Hutchison, 26, posted a second auction to extend her baby-as-billboard scheme into the month of August (with the added headline: "This auction is world famous!!!!"). The new auction ends June 10, three days after Hutchison expects to give birth to her already-revenue-generating progeny.

And by midday, GoldenPalace.com had put out a news release touting its "sponsorship" of the Hutchison infant, comparing it to companies sponsoring a young Tiger Woods and referring to itself as the "Internet casino-turned household name."

I wouldn't do it, and I'll openly say that I think the mother in question lacks a little bit in the character area. What was she going to do if her kid ended up wearing porn ads? But to each his own -- and to be fair, baby clothes are expensive as hell.