"Hills Like White Elephants" & Abortion

Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants" portrays what is very probably the end of a relationship between a man and a woman over their differences with respect to her pregnancy and his urging her to have an abortion. This study will analyze the story and the effects the proposed abortion has on the woman and on her attitude toward the man and the relationship. The study will also consider the reality of abortion in the early twentieth century---when Hemingway wrote the story and before abortion was legal and socially acceptable--and the effect that this reality had on the woman in the story. The argument of the study in this regard will be that the legal and social specifics of the reality of abortion in the era of the story played little if any role in her feelings about the pregnancy, the abortion, and the relationship. It will be argued that she would have felt as she did even if abortion had been legal and safe and easy to obtain.

There is, first of all, no doubt that there was at the time Hemingway wrote the story a different situation existing than today with respect to the legality and social acceptance of abortion as an alternative to carrying a fetus to term. As Peter L. Hays writes, "One must remember that the setting for the story is Catholic, conservative Spain of the 1920s: abortions are illegal, condemned by the church, difficult to obtain, and dangerous" (Hays, 1990, 56-57).

Hays makes certain assumptions here which are perhaps not justifie

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but none were as safe as the man in Hemingway's story would like to believe. He says "It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig." Here he calls the woman by name for the first time, an indication, perhaps, of his desire to soften her up for his persuading. He says, "It's not really an operation at all. . . . I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in. . . . They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural" (Hemingway, 1927, 212). The authors writing on abortion consulted for this study all make clear that abortion in the 1920s was definitely a "real operation," was not merely a matter of "letting the air in," and was at best a dangerous procedure (Caruana, 1992, 13; Bonavoglia, 1991, 17). Nevertheless, the woman in the story does not seem concerned with this aspect of the abortion. The woman in the story sees the child as a symbol of their love for one another, and if she chooses, or is forced by him, to have an abortion, it appears that she feels the relationship will be over. For her, to choose abortion is to choose the end of the relationship. We see this in her own words when she turns away from the arid part and the landscape and turns to the fertile part: "Acr

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