Europe's Most Fertile Man

What in the world? Again, from The Week Magazine, an article of modest, amusing interest to those of us doing family research. Now, there are other elements to this story other than the questions/problems this would raise for a person building a family tree. On a side note, I remember hearing that something like 15% of people discover during DNA testing that there was a "non-paternal" event in their tree. In other words, someone they thought was a father turns out not to be. That's a larger number than I would have suspected. In this case, it is out in the open, so long as the parents are forthright with their children about their paternity.

Ed Houben is sought after by women all over Europe, said John Laurenson in BBC.com. The Dutch “charitable sperm donor” is prized for his legendary powers of insemination, having fathered a staggering 98 children in the last decade. More unusually, he donates his sperm in the “traditional way”: by forgoing the syringe and having sex with the women—many of whom are married. “Much better chance of conception,” Houben explains. The 44-year-old started donating to sperm banks in 2002, but when the Netherlands banned anonymous sperm donation, he offered his stud services for free online. As requests poured in, Houben began keeping an up-to-date list of his children on his computer. One British couple now awaiting a delivery came to him after several unsuccessful trips to fertility clinics. “They stayed for eight days and—how should I put it correctly?—she and I slept together four times, and after almost 10 years of trying they had their first pregnancy.” The husbands, he says, rarely present a problem. They’re so eager to have a baby that they’re “beyond these feelings of, ‘Ooh, there’s a stranger sleeping with my wife.’” And that’s what it’s all about, Houben insists: the “beautiful hope of creating a new life that will be loved and looked after.”

One would think that these children must be told their parentage, as what would happen should they find each other.... we have seen from previous posts that there are plenty of long lost siblings out there who find one another later in life....