Steve:
What if humans laid an egg instead of carrying a fetus?
Would that make women more likely to have more kids? How big would the egg be that a woman would lay? Would you want to be on duty to sit on the egg to keep it warm? How long would it have taken society to find human egg incubators so you could go on about their lives without being held down by egg sitting?
It would certainly make abortion a whole lot easier. No more trips to Planned Parenthood for nervous teenage girls. Just hide that egg for a couple of weeks, agonize over your decision, and then make your problems disappear inside a hearty Denver omelet. I, for one, would be terrified of pissing off any diner waitress, lest she serve me her zygote as revenge.
Let's assume that you have to lay a big egg to hatch a human baby, like even bigger than an ostrich egg. This would make the egg-laying process painful for any woman, as labor is now. BUT you would have a shorter gestation period inside your body. A chicken egg spends one day inside a hen and three weeks outside the hen, incubating. If applied to humans, that would mean the woman would spend a scant 13 days "pregnant" with a Kanye egg before dropping it and incubating it for eight and a half months. That's a lot more desirable than spending nine uncomfortable months with a fetus kicking your insides out.
But many women wouldn't even realize they were pregnant until the egg came out. Imagine how many eggs would fall into the toilet and break. MILLIONS. So many toilet eggs. Disposing of them would be so easy—and so easy to disguise—that abortions would skyrocket. THINK OF ALL THE BABY TEBOWS THAT WOULD BE MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD.
Men would be asked to share in incubation duties. The people at BIG STROLLER would create incubator strollers, with moms-to-be toodling around town, giving you the death stare if you dare come too close and break their egg. Stupid people would bejewel the eggs and paint them with misinterpreted Chinese symbols. The black market for eggs would proliferate, with eggs being sold on eBay for as much as $50,000. Easter egg grass stock would quadruple. The Royal Baby egg would have its own gilded litter for traveling. People magazine would commission pictures of it. Why would you put an egg on your cover? It's just a stupid fucking egg. Lame.
"Hatching parties" would become a thing. Your friend would invite you to her house once the egg first cracks and offer mimosas to you as you watch the baby slither out of its shell, and you'll have to pretend that it isn't disgusting. Brooklyn mothers would make boutique exfoliating scrubs out of their discarded eggshells.
And Travis Henry would have 5,000 eggs unaccounted for across the country. That's what would happen.
Now, to the Funbag below!
Drew Magary writes for Deadspin and Gawker. He's also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at drew@deadspin.com. You can also buy Drew's book, Someone Could Get Hurt, through his homepage.