SINGAPORE: I recently got to thinking about my baby. The adorable little tot I would give birth to via C-section in a fancy hospital in the south of France if I were a celebrity. It is a hypothetical baby, of course, seeing that I’m neither famous nor blessed with ovaries. That, and I don’t speak French.

I’d name my make-believe munchkin something worthy of his celebrity-spawn status. Something clever and mysterious like Pythagoras Theorem. Or Stomata. Or maybe Pi, which would be short for his full name: Three Point One Four Wong.

I’d hold baby Pi in my arms, stare into his beady little eyes and try not to drop him on his head.

And then I’d sell pictures of him to OK! Magazine for a big pile of cash. Got a problem with that?

The Brangelina twins arrived last Saturday night and caused a kafuffle without having to raise a pinky from their cots.

According to the Associated Press, the first pictures of Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt are worth more than US$11 million ($14.8 million), putting them at the top of Access Hollywood’s list of the Top 10 most expensive baby photos.

It is a list Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have done tremendously well in. Shiloh, the first spawn of their genetically perfect loins, is at No 3, thanks to People magazine shelling out US$4.1 million for her first pictures in 2006. Pax Thien, adopted from Vietnam last year, is at No 5 with his pictures snapped up for US$2 million.

The rest of their brood — Zahara and Maddox — didn’t crack the Top 10.

Immediately, netizens starting ranting about how its “deplorable to auction off your kids’ privacy”, as one lady put it.

Even ethicist Bruce Weinstein weighed in, commenting on CNN’s AC360° blog: “A parent’s most important responsibility is to be concerned primarily with protecting the interests of his or her child. It is a severe violation of this responsibility to sell photos of one’s child to the highest bidder.

“Infants are not capable of providing an informed consent to having their pictures taken and sold to the tabloids,” he wrote, before adding that it should somehow offend my “moral sensibilities”.

Just how is being photographed with your bundle of joy a violation of one’s responsibility to protect the child’s interests?

Celebrity couples like Brangelina generate a ton of interest, and where there’s celebrity interest, there’s a paparazzi infestation.

Arranging for a magazine to have exclusive rights to take their family portrait helps to ease the tabloid frenzy to get the all-important first pictures at all — and sometimes treacherous — costs.

In the case of the twins and Shiloh, Brad and Angelina announced that the fee would go to a charity of their choice, not to their family vacation fund.

Even if they had decided to keep the millions, there would be nothing wrong with that. How is it erroneous to make a buck off an industry that feeds off the intimate details of your personal life?

Celebrities are selling shiny happy photographs of babies and their proud parents — unflattering pictures of whom will surface in tabloids without their permission anyway. Seriously, it’s not like they’re selling their children to a Romanian travelling circus.

As a parent, you make decisions that your baby might not necessarily agree with if it had more advanced cognitive abilities. If he can forgive you for deciding he would look debonair dressed up as a sunflower, he can forgive you for depositing US$11 million into his first savings account.

Besides, does that make non-celebrity parents, who sign their babies up for Cutest Baby competitions to possibly win a month’s supply of milk formula, morally reprehensible?

Did the naked baby in the diaper ad verbally agree to playing a part that required partial nudity?

The next time you feel a twinge of indignation while reading about how some famous person got paid an obscene amount of cash for a picture of their baby’s squinty mug, take a closer look.

It’s not your moral sensibilities being offended — it’s just envy poking at your spleen.

US$11 million doesn’t make Brangelina’s twins better than your kids. It just makes them richer. - TODAY/fa