Sorry, meant contraceptives, duh. Also, I’m aware that they did have mildly scientifically backed methods for preventing pregnancy, but pregnancies are a genuine concern for modern sex workers, right? Did just way more sex workers get pregnant way more often back then, or were there genuinely methods to make pregnancy avoidable enough to not have a kid once a year if you’re having sex that much?
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Abortion Drugs Fundamental to Ancient Economies, Argues Historian:
>As [John M.] Riddle details, the Egyptians listed abortifacients in medical texts. The Greeks were so accustomed to abortion drugs that the playwright Aristophanes joked about them, describing in Lysistrata a desirable young woman “trimmed and spruced with pennyroyal,” a well-known abortion drug. Riddle holds that the plant silphium (related to giant fennel / Ferula family) was popular with the Greeks and Romans primarily because it was used to terminate pregnancies – so much so that the city-state of Cyrene (in modern-day Libya) based its whole economy on the plant until it was overharvested to extinction.
>His research reveals that in the Middle Ages, abortion drugs were also integral to economies. The typical European village would have available a “wise woman” or midwife, and later, an apothecary, who knew exactly what herbal remedies to give women who did not wish to be pregnant and could produce reliable results. Through such fertility intervention, he says, family size was managed in ways that may well have impacted whole populations, causing some government officials associating large families with economic prosperity to view women who controlled fertility as potential enemies of the state.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/abortion-drugs-fundamental-to-ancient-economies-argues-historian
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