A Conversation With Europe’s Most Prolific Sperm Donor
By day, Ed Houben is a mild-mannered, 44-year-old bachelor who works as a tour guide in the Dutch town of Maastricht, where he lives.
On nights and weekends, however, Houben comes alive as his alter ego: Europe’s most prolific sperm donor, and one who prefers to contribute the old-fashioned way.
“Sperm cells are like candy at Mardi Gras,” Houben says. “The more you throw out, the better you get.”
Houben says he has 99 known children scattered around the globe. “I have children in Australia, Israel, Canada, Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Italy, England,” he says. “There are also the possibles” — the women he had sex with whom he never heard from again.
“At the beginning, I would assume they were angry with me,” he says. “Then later, several people came back and said, ‘We were afraid you’d want to get involved in our lives. But now we want another one.’ ”
If there’s one thing that remains constant about Ed Houben, it’s that he’s always ready to give. And he says his methodology is the kindest there is.
“A normal person would prefer to feel desired by a man who wants to have children with her,” he says. “No woman grows up hoping to meet a knight in shining armor with a syringe.”
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With the woman in Brazil — as with all women who request artificial insemination — Houben makes it clear that any other client who prefers the natural method will always come first. And he is a very busy man.
“You know, no ovulation tests bother to ask me if I’ve worked a 14-, 16-hour day,” he says. “I’m still a person. I have to eat, sleep, clean my house . . . It’s stress.”
And even a man as fertile as Houben is not immune to performance anxiety. “I actually try to keep the image in my mind,” he says, “that men are always ready for action.”
Houben’s last relationship was long-distance and lasted two years. He says what ultimately broke it apart was not his sleeping with other women — it was that he couldn’t get his girlfriend pregnant.
“I’m not lying awake here that I don’t have a family,” he says. “But my plan is to find the woman of my life, and if she wants me to stop, I’ll stop. And if she wants to have children, I would do that.”
Houben has no legal documents drawn up. He feels protected enough by Dutch law and the quality of people he has chosen to help. He visits with some of his children and always leaves how much contact — if any — up to the parents. He does not think there will be any fallout from his continuing work. In fact, he says he’s doing would-be mothers around the world a service.
“I get e-mails from Turkish men, Indonesian men saying that if I have too many women, they’d like to help,” Houben says. “If I stop, I have to leave the women to these guys.”
It’s quite the quandary: “I cannot help everybody,” he says. “I cannot solve all the problems in the world.”
http://www.newsweek.com/ed-houben-europes-most-prolific-sperm-donor-238662
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/04/sperm-donor-has-fathered-87-kids-the-natural-way/
Update: Ed is now at 106 babies.
seems like too much work.
