There are a great many motivations, pressures and influences acting on individuals to encourage the production of children and a corresponding number of options for planning and limiting the size of a family unit. These can be broadly separated into two categories, although as we shall see these categories are not immutable: ante-natal and post-partum strategies. Antenatal strategies include contraception and abortion, while post-partum strategies include abandonment, child selling and infanticide. In modern parlance, these strategies are all distinct and clearly defined, but in the surviving evidence from the post-Imperial world, they are considerably more fluid and obscure.

On contraception, the only information on its use that is left to us comes from sermons written by unmarried men who aimed to erase the very existence of sexual contact for pleasure, of whom the most focused are Caesarius of Arles and Martin of Braga. Caesarius is particularly strident in his denunciation of such practices, holding forth across three sermons on the evils of contraceptive techniques including, ‘[H]erbs, diabolical marks [and] sacrilegious amulets,’ none of which can have been effective. On methodology, it appears that the Greek and Roman medical writers still held sway, with Soranus and Aristotle being particularly common. However, these include many more methods than those listed by Caesarius, including suppositories, potions, spermicides, coitus interruptus, pessaries, spermicides, genital salves, post-coital exercises, anaphrodisiacs and the observance of ‘fertile’ and ‘sterile’ periods. Caesarius exhorts his entire province to abandon such practises, repeating the patristic assertion that any act preventing conception through contraception is murder. This is a damning statement on the practice, making the use of contraception a fundamental sin. Elsewhere he refers to women ‘destroying fertility’ through artificial sterilisation, an act he calls mass murder. These accusations are fairly detailed, and are compared to abortion. They are, however, almost direct repetitions of previous accusations made by Jerome and Augustine, who claimed that women drank potions and caused themselves to be sterile in order to engage in illicit sexual intercourse with their husbands, that is sexual intercourse purely for pleasure. This is a theme which is directly related to the pre-Christian classical Roman accusation that women sterilised themselves in order to engage in extra-marital sexual activity.