Burmeister, while still offering a premium service, has set her first cycle rate at just under $3500.She’s also offering egg-freezing at around $4500 per cycle, about half that of her main competitors. 1,474 Followers, 357 Following, 343 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Judith (@judith_burmeister) It’s not just the perfect make-up. I can look them in the eye. Without the heft of the Monash system behind her, she’s working harder than ever: 13-hour days plus Saturday mornings. “We were all friends before that,” she says.The media attention Burmeister received about the ovarian tissue transplant and Kruger’s pregnancy further exacerbated tensions, with some of her colleagues believing the publicity went to her head, not to mention gave her an unfair commercial advantage.Gab Kovacs, a former mentor of Burmeister and now-retired IVF doctor, says Monash was also “a bit of a boys’ club”.
Before he takes me into the couple’s mansion-like apartment, he wants to explain how they came to be here: in 2018, a freak storm collapsed the ceilings of their Victorian-era home in South Yarra. “He’s the unsung hero in Mum’s career.” Each morning, Ippoliti gets up and makes his wife coffee. She’s wearing blue scrubs but still maintains some glamour: under her desk are a pair of 15-centimetre-heel platform sandals from Italian label Aquazzura. She was Monash IVF’s busiest specialist, overseeing 1200 IVF cycles annually, a quarter of the company’s Victorian business. “Carl Wood,” she says, “loved me.” But the other Monash professors had different plans: they gave the position to another doctor, who’d trained in Europe.It’s possible, of course, that the other doctor was genuinely the better candidate. The patients, apparently, were a little alarmed. Raymond and Judith Burmeister lived a middle-class life in Mitcham, but their daughter wanted for more. Eventually, after what sounds like an exhausting courtship that involved running around the Tan track and doing uphill sit-ups, they got together, marrying in 1995.“I just remember we were driving in the car and she said that being with me was just a natural thing for her,” says Ippoliti, sitting opposite me at the banquet-length dining table in one of the apartment’s cavernous rooms. “And they probably weren’t as nice to her as they should have been.”In 2011, gaffer tape was put over her name on a sign outside one of the Monash centres after other doctors complained that she was one of only two doctors named on the sign.
“I plan to take them over.” I look at her, confused.
It’s still getting fixed, and will be sold, but in the meantime the bank helped finance the purchase of this $14.7 million apartment.Ippoliti opens the door.
But it wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last, that the male-dominated IVF establishment sidelined the hyper-feminine Burmeister, the likes of which they’d never seen before.A few years earlier, she’d turned up to an all-male panel for her interview for the training program with the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. So much pink: pink poodle figurines, pink pigs, pink pineapples.
This is where things started to really sour. “Then when I don’t, they probably get grumpy.” And people do get grumpy. I feel this is my talent.”Now we’re standing in front of the “Man Cave”, where men recline in a black armchair, view an iPad with porn on it, and produce a sperm specimen. If Burmeister sells herself as the “Fertility Queen”, surely, I ask, people are more likely to believe a baby will be bestowed upon them?“Yes,” she says immediately. She even talked about it in her sleep.”Lynn Burmeister with hotelier husband Fabrizio Ippoliti and their daughter, Tatiana, and son, Fab jnr. No, says Burmeister. Is she serious? He’s the unsung hero in Mum’s career.”Burmeister strives to do most transfers herself, other than when she’s at a conference or on holidays.
That is not going to help your mindfulness.’ ”But most importantly, she doesn’t want to treat her patients in a hospitalised environment.
“I cried all the way to [work],” she says.