"The Secret Life of the American Teenager" tells the story of Amy Juergens (Shailene Woodley), a teenager who becomes pregnant after losing her virginity. At the beginning of the project, Woodley was inspired by the show's plot and signed onto the project after reading the scripts for the show's first three episodes.
"[Those episodes] all hit home," she told Bustle in a 2020 interview. "I had friends in high school who were pregnant. It felt like everything that I wanted to be sending into the world." But the progressive nature of the show's original episodes turned more morally conservative over the course of five seasons, featuring characters encouraging each other to abstain from premarital sex, shaming those who did have sex, and wearing promise rings.
Woodley wasn't the only cast member who felt uncomfortable sending out these messages to audiences. "There were a lot of things that were written into the scripts that not just me, but a lot of the cast, disagreed with," she told Bustle. Contractually-bound for the duration of the show, Woodley had to stick it out, also telling Bustle that "[t]o this day, it's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."
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