A couple weeks ago we told you about Trent Arsenault, the dude the FDA is now persecuting because he's giving away his sperm via a personal website but isn't doing all the appropriate testing to abide by their regulations. The 36-year-old Fremont man calls himself a "donorsexual" and he appears to enjoy his role as a freelance donor of "top quality" organic sperm (he eats a low-calorie, all-organic diet), and now the Chron has done a whole feature on him (a couple weeks late), with their own set of photos of Arsenault with his cat in his rather spartan, Metro-shelf-filled home.

In the last five years he's donated sperm hundreds of times to 46 different women, and fathered 14 children for Bay Area couples. Now the FDA has issued a stern warning to Arsenault threatening him with a year in prison or $100,000 because he isn't following federal regulations and getting blood tests for communicable diseases within seven days of every donation. And he's fighting the FDA, both in court and in the press, going on CNN, Fox and elsewhere to plead his case. He thinks it's unfair, and being tested before every one of his frequent donations would be cost-prohibitive, and his case presents a potentially interesting legal precedent for fertility law.

In October, Tina Brown's Newsweek featured him as part of a cover story titled "You Got Your Sperm Where?" in which we learned about the underground world of free, online sperm donation. More and more same-sex couples and others have been bypassing sperm banks and turning to the practice of getting live sperm from individuals they meet in person, via the internet or through friends. (Conventional wisdom seems to be that fresh, live sperm are more viable and less "sleepy" than sperm that have been frozen, not to mention cheaper if sourced through one of these free websites.)

Arsenault, an engineer at Hewlett-Packard, has an amusing website where he promotes himself and his sperm, and since he's not getting any financial compensation one wonders what he gets out of this deal. He got into the free sperm donation game, it seems, out of a desire to have personal contact with the women he's helping inseminate, and he takes pride in how many women he's gotten pregnant. Some may find this creepy. Our biggest concern is that in 15 years when there are dozens of his teenage spawn running around the Bay Area, we'd like to hope they don't all unknowingly hook up, you know?

Below, the Daily Beast/Newsweek provides a video summary of their sperm story:

[Chron]
PREVIOUSLY: FDA Decides Fremont Man Is A Sperm Factory
You Got Your Sperm Where? [Newsweek]