ABSTRACT
In the 1927 Ernest Hemingway short story ‘Hills Like White Elephants’, a man tries to persuade his reluctant girlfriend to get an abortion, although the a-word is never mentioned. He tells her, ‘It’s really an awfully simple operation…. It’s not really an operation at all’ and ‘We’ll be fine afterwards…. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy’ (212). His facile insistence that ‘I’m perfectly willing to go through with [the pregnancy] if it means anything to you’ is undercut by repeated attempts to convince her that abortion is the best solution (214).
