Laughing at the irony, Tricha Shivas ’98 says, “I told all of my friends that I’m going to be an experience event!” And she was. Shivas spoke to the Albright community on the subject of Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ART): Babies vs. Crack Babies as part of a series of presentations and community discussions presented by Albright’s Center for Ethics, Law and Medicine.

This lecture stemmed from a project Shivas has been working on with Sonya Charles, a colleague at Michigan State. She compared women who use illegal drugs while pregnant to women who have high order multiple births as a result from ART. “The risks are identical yet, one mother is shunned because of her drug abuse and the other is rewarded,” she says. Speaking to a large audience in the Campus Center South Lounge, Shivas explained that, “We, as a society, are deeming who is fit to be a mother and unfortunately there are racial and economic components.”

The media also plays a large role in how the country perceives these two kinds of mothers. “When the story is about crack, it is most often focused on the children and their problems but when it is about the birth of high orders, it is focused on the parents and on the gifts they receive as in the case of the McCaughey septuplets,” says Shivas.

For some in the audience that was a revelation. “That is so true. I never thought of it that way,” said audience member Lauren Finnigan ’04 after the presentation.

Shivas is a bioethicist currently in her second year of the doctoral program in philosophy at Michigan State University. The discipline of bioethics deals with ethical questions in the fields of science and medicine. “I took my first bioethics class spring semester my junior year at Albright and it completely threw me for a loop,” says Shivas. She had to change all of her future plans because of her newfound love for bioethics.

After Albright, Shivas went on to receive her master’s degree in bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2000. In addition to classes at Michigan State, Shivas was hired as a graduate assistant, which gives her the opportunity to teach several undergraduate courses at MSU. “I love teaching and I would really like to pursue a career in academia,” she says.

Shivas also lectures frequently but says she likes to take part in discussions rather than give lectures. “There is more value for me and the audience when people can discuss these kinds of issues,” she says.

— Amy M. Buzinski ’03