Imagine that a man hits a pregnant woman and unintentionally causes her to have an abortion. How should he make amends for killing a fetus? Would he have to pay compensation for the woman's injuries too? Did compensation depend on her status? What if she died? And suppose the man had meant to harm or kill her? Would he then also have to pay for killing what was in her womb? The thoughts of jurists who raised and wrestled with these questions have survived in a legal commentary, the Liber Papiensis, designed to guide legal practitioners in eleventh-century Pavia. Evidence from multiple jurisdictions in subsequent centuries shows unequivocally that such cases really occurred. A fifteenth-century compilation of verdicts by a lay judicial panel operating in Leipzig, for example, included a verdict on two armed men who had broken into another man's house. The intruders came across his pregnant wife. Shaken by the ordeal, she fell ill and miscarried the child within a few days. If the homeowner could prove that his wife really had fallen ill out of fright and if the unintended abortion could be confirmed by two reputable women, the men would have to pay monetary compensation.

The norms underlying the Leipzig verdict, if not quite the specific procedures, are reminiscent of norms embedded in post-Roman law-codes. The specific law on which the Pavian jurists were commenting had originally been issued by a seventh-century Lombard king. The legal approach addressed in theory at Pavia and in practice at Leipzig ultimately originated in early medieval law. What we lack for the Early Middle Ages, however, are equivalents of the Liber Papiensis and the Leipzig verdict: jurisprudential discussions of legal regulations on abortion and cases which allow us to see how such regulations were applied in practice. All that we have to work with are the regulations themselves in several leges barbarorum issued in post-Roman kingdoms.

Theoretically, abortion could constitute an offence in a number of different ways. Third-party abortion, a useful shorthand for miscarriage induced through violence or other means, intentionally or accidentally, by someone other than the pregnant woman, appeared in all promulgated law-codes which clearly addressed abortion. People who supplied medicinal herbs or magical potions to cause abortion or otherwise affect fertility also featured in some codes – sometimes specified as women, sometimes not.