What Partying does to the Unborn
In a world like today’s the moral values are not what they used to be. Many people have become too dependent on being the life of the party to care about the unborn lives they are stealing from the world. In the short story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway published in 1927 we are told a story that too many people today know to be familiar. We learn about a girl called Jig who is completely dependent on a man called the American, the American is trying to convince Jig to have an abortion so he my continue to party. People today must face their own reality of this story, like when a mother gives her own daughter the choice of getting rid of her unborn baby or to get out of the home she's always known. Women are continually being left with these ultimatums when we should be celebrating new life instead of killing it.
Life could be something that is cherished, but now much like in Aldous Huxley's novel “Brave New World” when the kids are going through death conditioning we are going through life conditioning. Like Jig and so many other women they are given the choice of having the baby and losing everything or not having the baby and losing everything they could have. This is teaching us that the material things we own are more important than the aspect of bringing a new life into the world, that our own comfort is worth more than the unborn lives we took place in creating. Jig at one point is looking out at the fields of life and growth and says to the American “And we could have all this”(169). By “this” Jig doesn't mean the physical aspects of life she
means that she could have a family and a home with the American and even the baby. Tim Akers further explains in his criticism “When she says that ‘they could have everything’...for Jig ‘everything’ seems to include the baby”(Akers 165). When he says “for Jig” this means that the American and Jig have contrasting views on what they want their lives to become. Jig wants to have joy and happiness in her life while the American too wants this his joys come from the partying and the sex; whereas Jig dreams of the family and home she doesn't have. Jig hasn’t heard the baby's first cry or seen its smile but she cares for its life and you can see throughout the story that she is apprehensive about getting the abortion. The American on the other hand doesn't care for this unborn life he helped create with Jig nor does he respect or care about Jigs true opinion of what happens to the baby. When the American and Jig are talking about the abortion and the American is trying to calm Jigs nerves he says “It's really not anything. Its just to let the air in [ he then also states].... That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy”(168). The American knows nothing about the operation and to him it means nothing to throw away an unborn child, he proves that he would rather live a reckless life than give life to the child...
