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How Christine Kirby became a pioneer in fertility treatment and created thousands of families

The first time Dr Christine Kirby saw her granddaughter Aria was through a microscope in a lab. For the woman whose life’s work is creating families - bringing thousands of babies into the world over the past 40 years - nothing had been harder than trying to help her only daughter Katie become a mum herself.

Christine was closely involved in Katie's IVF treatment, along with her colleagues at Repromed, the fertility clinic she co-founded as a ���˴�Ƭ company in 1987.  She was part of a management buy-out of Repromed in 2006, and went into partnership with a private equity firm in 2008. In 2014, Repromed was floated on the ASX.

“It was really hard, to know what I knew but to sit with Katie and at times keep my mouth shut knowing all the things that could potentially go wrong in her cycle,” said Christine. “I remember when Katie had been down in Adelaide from NSW (where she lives) for her cycle, and my husband Chris and I had taken her to the airport after her treatment. “We were on our way back home to Hindmarsh Island, and the next minute there’s this sobbing phone call with Katie saying, ‘mum, nothing fertilised’. She was at the airport alone and there’s nothing I could do, absolutely nothing.” As heartbreaking as this was, Christine tried to view it as a learning opportunity.

“The journey of waiting – to see how many eggs there are, and then seeing what’s fertilised, and then another few days of waiting to see what develops – I think it’s part of your personal growth. “You’d prefer you weren’t going through it, but it makes you really understand what’s happening from a patient’s perspective.” 

Having that understanding of the soul crushing mental anguish and devastation felt after failed IVF cycles (it took five cycles for Katie to finally conceive Aria), and then experiencing the elation after successful treatment is something that sets Christine apart from other fertility specialists.

“When I went for my interview in my third year of physiotherapy, with the same interview panel, this guy said to me, ‘I don’t really understand why you want to do this. You can buy a car, you can travel overseas, you could even marry a doctor if you wanted to’.”

In 1973, Christine had interviewed for an Air Force cadetship in medicine. “The interviewer said to me, ‘look, we don’t actually have any facility to have a female medical cadetship in the Air Force’, so I said to him, ‘but more than half of the trainees are now female so if you don’t sort this out, you’re going to be missing out on all sorts of things’. Around 12 months later, I received a phone call saying, ‘look, it’s all changed, you can apply now’, but the moment had passed.”

These days, Christine works as a Senior Fertility Specialist at Repromed, spends precious time with Aria and Katie, and enjoys tarmac car rallies with husband Chris. “Chris and I first met at Goolwa speedboat racing.  He was driving his boat and I was racing my dad’s boat. “Motorsport is our relaxation passion so we do a lot of tarmac rallies,” Christine said. 

As she proudly flicks through the many photos of Aria, it’s clear how besotted Christine is with the ‘bubbly girl’ she helped create. “It’s amazing – the magic of being able to look at an embryo and then look at their little person. You look down a microscope and say to yourself ‘how? How does that happen?’”

Story by Rachael Nightingale
Photos by Matt Turner