Hills Like White Elephants

Hills Like White Elephants is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway during his life time of 1899- 1961. When I first read this story I found it to be rather vague. The entire story seemed to be about a young girl and an average age man somewhere in the mountains of Barcelona, Spain sitting in a bar next to some railroad tracks, and while waiting for their train they were filling themselves with drinks. Meanwhile they carried on a conversation about something of importance but they never allude to what it is. Discussion in class certainly helped to make the story more understandable but I was still puzzled because apparently the subject of their conversation to which they never mentioned was that the girl needs to have or is going to have an abortion. I assume the child is the man’s but the story is vague on details so we can only assume this. What does not make sense though is if the girl is pregnant why is she drinking so much because we know it is extremely bad for the baby for the mother to drink during her pregnancy. Perhaps the story is set in a time before we had the medical technology to know it was bad to drink during her pregnancy but then the question comes up how prevalent would an abortion have been during that time period.