I elaborate on what I call the homologizing of pregnancy and motherhood, both as a matter of law and culture, and as a matter of the experience of pregnancy and its conceptualization in language.
Thus, legal regulation of abortion has been steeped in ideological interpretations of motherhood that result in women's subordination.(85) Second, I reveal that homologizing pregnancy and motherhood has been possible because the notion of abortion as part of a spectrum of mothering activities resonates with many women's experiences.(86) Third, by putting abortion in the frame of mothering decisions I include intrauterine life in the feminist discussion of abortion and salvage that side of the discourse from anti-abortion rhetoric.(87)
First, it is claimed that preliminary (i.e., nonphylogenetic) criteria for homologizing characters - for example, the position of the character in relation to other features - are difficult and perhaps even impossible to apply to behavioral traits (Atz, 1970; Hodos, 1976; Aronson, 1981).
However, this is not to say that it is intrinsically difficult to detect homology among behavioral traits, only that it is difficult to obtain behavioral data that one might even think of homologizing. This problem is not nearly as pronounced for morphology.