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Abortion In Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants

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Abortion Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” is about an American couple at a train station who have a conversation about the women and the baby she is carrying. They struggle to decide if they should keep the baby or have an abortion. Throughout the story they drink beers together and struggle to talk about the unwanted baby. In the story it is very clear at the beginning that the women really wants to keep the baby, because it is their baby and it will keep them together, but the man says that he does not want the women to have the baby if she does not want to, but he implies that it is best if she goes through with the operation. The man implies that giving up the baby would make them happier as a couple and everything …show more content…

The doctors just let the air in and a few hours later it was over” (Nagel Pg.59) and in Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” when you read the story the man says to the women “Its nothing, they just let the air in and its over.” Robert McAlmon indicates that a hint of the story had been in Hemingways mind since the Rapallo day’s which happened in early 1923(Nagel pg.59) so the thought of an abortion story had been on his mind 5 years prior to when he actually wrote the short story. Then one day Ernest went out for lunch to eat oysters before lunch and he met a girl that he had known had gotten an abortion before and then they sat and talk, not about the abortion in particular but about a bunch of different things. Then on his way home he thought up multiple things that could go into the story, he ended up skipping lunch, and spent the afternoon writing the short story. If you read the story closely you can see that the talk with the girl is there, the casual of McAlmon’s anecdote has turned numb, confronting the casual attitude of her lover; and of course, there is a great …show more content…

The women second guessing the abortion and saying no the whole time could have been, because the couples relationship just within this one story shows that the women did not have much power or say so in anything that the couple did and by having the baby she has the most power between the two of them. Then when he says no she goes back to being the scared girl who doesn't have much power at all. Throughout the story the man praises the good things about the abortion and the girl just keeps silence. Which indicates that she does not agree with the things that he is saying. He then says “Ill go with you and ill stay with you the whole time” and you can tell that the girl is just too concerned with what the relationship would be like after the operation is done. She keeps saying to him “And if I do it youll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me again”(Charters pg.591). This indicates that she doesn't think the man loves her anymore because of this unwanted baby and she is just concerned with how the relationship will change if she has the operation that he wants. Maybe the relationship wasn’t all that great before and the baby coming alone just took a toll on there relationship. In the article “The Effects of Abortion” they state that women who have abortions may have little or no long term psychological trauma. The mental well being after an abortion

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