'Hills Like White Elephants' by Ernest Hemingway tells the story of a man and a woman who, at first glance, , may seem like you're having a normal, rather boring conversation at a train station, but it's only when you look closer at what's actually being said by the characters and find the little clues that Hemingway cleverly incorporated into the story, that you realize how heavy the conversation is. Unlike many authors, Hemingway leaves it up to the reader to delve deeper into the story and decipher the situation for themselves, and a seemingly simple story can become so much more. The woman in the story wonders whether she should stick with the life she knows or start a whole new chapter in her life that could change her relationship with the man forever. Sometimes the true intentions are not always clear. The story begins in a train station bar in Spain. A man and a woman order drinks and start chatting. Although there is no description or narration as to the actual topic of the conversation, through subtle allusions in the story we can infer that the conversation at hand is about abortion, whether to have one or not. The first major clue is found in the title of the story itself. A white elephant is defined as something that is useless or inconvenient, expensive to maintain and/or difficult to dispose of. It can certainly be assumed that the term "white elephant" in the title serves as an analogy to the baby carried by the woman. Hemingway drops a second clue when the conversion takes a sudden turn, from the couple discussing beer to the man bringing up what seemed to be the random subject of an operation: "It's a terribly simple operation, I... ... middle of paper ...... the conflict is either resolved in a way that is clearly positive for the protagonist, or clearly negative. In this case, you need to consider the possibility that Jig's feelings may not have been correct. Maybe the man is right and their lives will go back to the same as before. She may have forgotten her feelings and returned to enjoying her life as she had heard others did after having an abortion. Or maybe she felt empty and unfulfilled for the rest of her life. The true “ending” is called into question. Abortion in our time is no longer what it might have been in the 1920s. Today there is intense debate over whether it is morally right or wrong and it is even a major political issue. Hemingway may have used one of the characters to express his true thoughts on the issue of abortion. It's unclear what her true beliefs are about abortion, but even