http://www.gq.com/story/how-to-have-bab ... -ed-houben
How One Man Fathered 106 Babies (and Counting)
A little while back, a woman—an ovulating professor from Germany—arrived in Maastricht, the Netherlands, to a neighborhood just beyond the city center, on the other side of the Maas River. She parked her car at a distance from her destination so as not to be recognized (she knows quite a few professors in Maastricht), and was briskly moving down the sidewalk toward the apartment of Ed Houben, when she got caught behind a father walking his little boy at dusk. The father and son drifted past the square, but when they came upon Ed's apartment, the father pointed a finger in the dark, and the boy looked up to the third floor, where a star-shaped lantern was lit in a window.
“That is where the Babymaker lives,” she heard the father say.
Later, when he heard the story from the ovulating professor, the Babymaker himself was delighted, for not everyone accepts what he does, and so he spends a lot of time explaining the wherefores and what-hows of his avocation, often with a startling dose of Dutch honesty.
But this boy and his father—what a small victory for Ed: a world in which the Babymaker lives just down the block and no one bats an eye or blushes, no one utters a condemning word, knowing he's there, ever ready.
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The first time Ed Houben slept with another man's wife was in Amsterdam. It was 13 years ago, Ed was 32, feeling unattractive, convinced no woman would ever consider having sex with him again. He wasn't a virgin, but the rapports sexuels that had come his way were, frankly, as rare as dogs in space. In fact, it had been ten years since his last encounter, though he claimed not to miss it, the sex that is, busy as he was with his job, volunteering for the national guard, and war re-enactments that a man of his ilk and interests can get sucked into.
However, he'd made a huge decision. Convinced that having a family might not be in the cards for him, Ed Houben (pronounced who-been) decided to become a sperm donor. He would show up twice a month at the clinic, “producing” in “the production room” to fill a cup for cash. The first time he went, they didn't even take his name. It couldn't have been more cold and impersonal.
“I was sort of expecting this gift of life to be received with sirens and fanfare,” says Ed. “I remember saying ‘Hello?’ and somebody from another room answered ‘Yes?’ ‘I have a cup here.’ ‘Oh, yes. Leave it on the table.’ ”
The more he donated, the more he desired some intimacy from the process. He began to advertise his willingness to do house calls on various websites. Produce a sample in the downstairs bathroom, deliver it upstairs—knock, knock—and retreat again, letting the clients take it from there. And on this occasion, here in Amsterdam, he anticipated it would be no different.
The woman had met him at the train station on her bike, and together they walked to her house, where they met her husband. She made some dinner, and they talked—wife, husband, Ed—until about 11 P.M. She smoked a joint and went upstairs, nervously. Ed had worked a full day in Maastricht and then took the train two and a half hours north. He'd now missed the last train back. It was possible, he thought, that he was too service-minded. The man kept chatting with him until, at midnight, Ed said, “Look, I really have to cut this short, because tomorrow I'm on the first train…” Blah, blah.
He knew how badly the couple wanted a baby, how badly he wanted to help. Sperm donation, as crazy as it sounds, was what now gave meaning to his life. As for the couple, he understood that theirs was what they call in the Netherlands “a traffic-light relationship,” one minute green and one minute red. The light was green now, but the man was sterile, having been snipped.
“I have to ask you a question,” said Ed to the man, “because maybe you notice she's nervous all the time.…”
“Yes, I've noticed,” said the man, and then he explained. “She's an artist,” he said, “and she feels very connected to nature. Basically she can't imagine a happy child will be created from a 12-cent syringe. She asked me to ask you—because she's too shy—if you would consider creating this child the natural way.”
At this, Ed found himself flustered. “I really didn't know what to say. I felt caught in a situation which many men would find highly stimulating. Okay, here's a guy asking you to have sex with his wife without worrying about consequences, and my romantic reaction was, ‘Did you have an STD test?’ ”
He was perched, of course, on the dividing line between two lives—between being an artificial inseminator of women and a natural one—and he thought it over for 15 minutes, which is a long time to leave a woman and her husband in limbo. He was thinking: Is there any ethical reason not to do this? Who do I hurt? After all, this was the way 7 billion people on earth have been created. At last Ed decided he would “go with the flow.”
They climbed the stairs and entered the room, and the woman was very relieved when she saw him there. When Ed turned to say “I'll take it from here,” her husband already had his pants off:
“We were three persons in the bed, and I was so surprised that I didn't know what to say. I had this combat inside—my head full of non-stimulating thoughts—but he never even accidentally touched me. He wanted to be present when his child was created.”
After that, Ed had no problem if husbands wanted to be on hand while he slept with their wives. Not that he would limit himself to married heterosexual couples—there were hundreds of single, gay, and otherwise ambiguously attached women who required his services, too. But there was something edifying about this married couple in particular, something that made sense that hadn't before: In allowing him to have sex with their wives, the men, too, were on a journey, one as private as their wives'. And in this strange, dichotomous act of largesse and cuckolding, Ed himself might save them from self-recrimination and ego free fall. By sharing his seed with their wives just so, in the ovulation go-zone, he might provide them with the greatest gift of all—a no-strings-attached baby—and in so doing complete their family with the final puzzle piece. What he least expected in return was gratitude, but that's just what he got.
Ed Houben is now, at the age of 46, one of the preeminent makers of babies on the planet, father to 106 children of whom two-thirds were made the natural way (i.e., by sexual intercourse) and a third made via artificial insemination. In addition, there are 30 or so he estimates from his years at the clinic. Put another way: Ed Houben, who once had sex once every decade, has fathered roughly ten kids every year for the past 15 years. And he's still at it, thumping his way into history. So prodigious is his legacy that the BBC dubbed him “Europe's most virile man,” while he regularly gets billed by media as “the Sperminator.”
The prerequisite for his calling, he believes, is full transparency. So visit his website—with the tagline “It is nice you found my website!”—and you will discover that Ed has tested negative for gonorrhea and chlamydia. You can see that he's tested negative for syphilis and HIV, too. You can gaze upon pictures of him, one in which he kneels beside one of his small children, from some years ago when he was a bit more youthful.
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.
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