This Guy Has Fathered Over 100 Babies, And I’m Still Wondering How

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Houben was literally on a ten year sex drought, then out of the blue after frequenting sperm banks for some time, he was convinced by a couple to make his donation the old-fashioned way. After pondering it for 15-minutes, he caved and said, “What the hell, why not?” And that’s been his gig since.

Nevertheless, he’s quick to describe himself as a “truly ugly fat guy with glasses.” An endomorphic bachelor with a somewhat block-shaped head and lower grill of uneven teeth, he lives in a five-room apartment, grad-school humble but relatively roomy by Dutch standards, from which his mother comes and goes, often cooking and cleaning for him. He doesn’t own a car; rather, he bikes everywhere, no matter what the weather.

In short, Ed Houben might be the world’s least likely natural inseminator (known in the donor world as an N.I., as opposed to an A.I., or artificial inseminator)—and maybe the best, if there is such a thing. Regardless, he’s a very normal-seeming person living a spectacularly abnormal life. He drinks coffee and goes to work (work he won’t specify for his employer’s sake, but it involves sharing his love for Maastricht and its history at an annual salary of 18,000 euros). He strolls the Old City, greeting those he knows with a cheery smile and slightly stiff formality.

But then, his outside-of-work schedule is constructed around an ever shifting lineup of assignations, all determined by the ovulation cycles of his clients, the women who come to him from the countries of Europe, from Brazil and Australia, Hong Kong and Japan. And sometimes, in turn, they fly him all over the world in order to mate with him. In one record week, he had six partners and 14 ejaculations (releasing around 4 billion sperm), not that he was counting. (Was he?) He’s also slept with three women in a day, and during one particular fecund streak successfully impregnated eight women in a row.

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