I don't know about you but I was a little kid when I first read this story and I might have either been completely stupid as hell or whatever but I was absolutely convinced that the procedure described in the story was in fact a lobotomy and not an abortion and this dude was straight up sitting in the bar literally convincing his girlfriend to get a fucking lobotomy.
For some reason I just thought that this was written during the time when they were still doing Leon Trotsky style icepick lobotomies.
If I had spoken about it to grown-up like I was supposed to they would have told me what it was actually about but I never did I was just sitting there thinking this was just some sort of morbid absurd farce and that Hemingway was absolutely this Kurt Cobain Black Metal motherfucker who blew his own head off with a shotgun. I closed the short story compilation book being all like "wow, respect, that was a banger."
It might have had something to do with my dad(rip) having read "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" by Ken Kesey to me earlier, my mom reading Kafka to me like every other night, and one of my oldest family friends (almost like a third grandma to me) being a psychiatric nurse for most of her life.
Makes it way better in my opinion.