Not having any luck conceiving a child? Ladies, meet Ed Houben. He might just be the world’s most virile man — or at least Europe’s most virile man. Houben, who is from the Netherlands, calls himself a “charitable sperm donor” — but although he used to donate his DNA the old fashioned way via a sperm bank in 2002, he has since moved on to doing it “the natural way.”
Sound skeezy? A little — but he provides his services for free, and he does it to help lesbian couples, single women, and heterosexual couples who are having trouble conceiving. He switched over from using sperm banks to… uh, “live and in person” donations when the Netherlands banned anonymous sperm donations. “Much better chance of conception,” he told the BBC –—and he would appear to be right. As of right now, he has fathered a whopping 98 kids.
Houben’s clients generally seem pretty satisfied (no pun intended), too. One of them, a 28-year-old nurse named Kati, said of her decision to have a baby with Houben, “I am single. I have long wanted to have a child, but I could never find the right man. So after six years, I started looking for [someone like] Ed.” She noted that they “got to know each other beforehand,” so it wasn’t as awkward as it could have been to sleep with a rando to have a child; she also likes the idea of being able to give her daughter answers when she starts asking questions about who her father is. Other success stories abound: The children of some of the lesbian couples to whom he’s provided his services make him coffee mugs at Father’s Day; a British couple who had been trying to get pregnant for ten years finally conceived with Houben’s help; a couple from Belarus who spent their life savings on clinics visited Houben three times and left after the third one with a child on the way.
Not going to lie: I’m pretty sure that Houben enjoys the fact that as an upshot of his “charitable donations,” he gets to have a lot of sex with a lot of different women. But hey, it’s not like he’s charging them a billion dollars for his services; and furthermore, if it’s each woman’s or couple’s choice to give Houben a shot, that’s totally their prerogative. Good for them for sticking to their dreams of having a family.
Oh, and in case you’re like me and the first question that popped into your head was, “But wait! What if two of Houben’s kids grow up, and meet, and fall in love, and don’t know that they share a father, and…?”, don’t worry — Houben thought of it, too. He keeps an up-to-date list of all the tiny humans he’s sired on his computer to cut down on the risk of them accidentally mingling in the gene pool together. Isn’t technology great?
