What is a good thesis statement for Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants"?

A story, however short, is seldom written
to
demonstrate a thesis in the same way as an academic essay, so there may be
a variety of
plausible answers to this, based on the reaction of individual
readers and what they think is
the story's most important theme. With that in
mind, here is my view:

A life lived
purely for selfish pleasure is ultimately hollow and
boring, deracinating the
one who lives it and cutting him or her off from anything that might
give
life meaning.

This sounds dangerously like a
moral,
which is why Hemingway never says any such thing, but he is constantly
demonstrating it. The
lives of the two protagonists are superficially
glamorous and exciting. As the girl says, they
"look at things and try new
drinks." The flatness of their conversation, however,
reveals that they are
sick of everything they do. Even the revelation that they are having a
child,
rather than being the traditional source of joy and celebration of a new life,
merely
entails a clinical discussion on how to get rid of the encumbrance
most efficiently.

The girl's dissatisfaction with this
lifestyle is shown by her reluctance to abort her
child, in her attempts to
find color and excitement in life, even in her extensive remarks on
their
surroundings. The man is too steeped in selfishness even to make any attempt or pretend
to
care about such things. Theis that the only effort he makes is to persuade
the girl to end a new
life so he can continue his existence undisturbed, but
this existence he protects is entirely
pointless.

Nihilism
is a constant theme in Hemingway's work, and it often
appears that he was
only saved from it himself by a strong belief in his own writing. Characters

like the man in the story often seem to be Hemingway's sketches of the type of person he
might
easily have become himself if he had not been a
writer.