Fertility 3 is a 1983 screenprint on paper by Keith Haring. With the HIV/AIDS crisis permeating the news, for Keith Haring its effects bled into his everyday life. Being part of the LGBTQ+ community during the peak of the epidemic made the matter very personal to him and was the impetus for his work to bring attention to the crisis.

“I’m not really scared of AIDS. Not for myself. I’m scared of having to watch people die in front of me” (Keith Haring Journals, 1987).

Fertility 3 appears to bring the struggle of pregnant people in Sub-Saharan Africa during the epidemic to light. At the time of its creation, it was becoming more apparent that the rates of passing HIV through childbirth were rising rapidly and devastating the region. Haring depicts a pregnant figure in Fertility 3, spotted and bent in a pose that embodies the phrase “breaking my back”. The spotted pattern, suggestive of infection of the devastating virus, is just one symbol of many in Haring’s body of work intended to lend clarity to his artistic messages in a similar fashion to Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the composition, the spatially dominating pregnant figure simultaneously seems to be held up and weighed down by smaller persons. The contrasting arrangement of figures that compete in size and movement speak to two starkly contrasting sides of childbirth during an epidemic: the risk of vertical transmission and weight of living in a diseased nation, and the potential of new life that provides a glimmer of hope and reason to go on.

See also: Fertility 1, Fertility 2, Fertility 4, and Fertility 5.