Luker 23) These changes in the language associated with the issue of teenage pregnancy illustrate the shifts in the subjective perception of the issue despite the insignificant changes in the objective conditions of the times.As Luker seeks to further emphasize the significance of the impact of language and categories in the negotiated order, she provides examples that reinforce the idea of reification. Reification, defined by William G. Roy in his book Making Societies, is the process by which “facts that were originally merely someone’s ideas, speculations, or theories take on a reality of their own” (Roy 19). More simply put, it is the process by which things are made real. Evidence of this process and its relationship to the issue of teenage pregnancy can be found in the trend in public thought in the 1920s that drew on the work of Sigmund Freud. Prior to World War I, nonprofessionals, often religiously motivated reformers, had been most active in working to remedy the problem of illegitimacy, a problem which they attributed to social forces. Progressive reformers were successful in encouraging the community to assume responsibility for children who lacked family resources and afford them protection by the state. As a result, out-of-wedlock children became appropriate subjects of a newly professionalized concern. By the 1920s, providing for those born to unmarried parents fell under the jurisdiction of the “helping professions,” researchers, social workers, and administrators who began to apply scientific expertise to the problem of teenage pregnancy, mostly in an effort to distinguish themselves from the nonprofessionals previously asscociated with remedying the problems of early child bearing. Members of the helping professions drew upon Sigmund Fred’s theory of the unconscious to better explain and remedy the dilemma of the unwed mother. They tended to regard all sex outside of marri...
