I just started watching the pirate TV show "Black Sails" and they show the whore house quite a lot. So that got me thinking, how did prostitutes in those times (and other times) not get pregnant? I understand the "pull out" method and they probably drank a lot, so conditions for pregnancies weren't perfect. But with the amount of sex they had, it seems it's just a matter of time before they did get pregnant. Was there some kind of "industry-wide standard" so to say, on dealing with this "occupational hazard"?
Also, surely at some point they did get pregnant and surely at some point attempts at abortions failed. So how did they deal with being pregnant and then having a child? Did they try to figure out who the father was? Did they somehow try to get money from the father (if the father was rich)? Did they try to get the father to care for her and the child in some way? How was their standing in the whore house affected by being pregnant and then being a mother? Surely there was no "maternity leave" for them. How did their reputation and attractiveness suffer, if at all, during and after pregnancy? What happened to the kid? etc etc etc
Houses of prostitution and the employees therein utilized a large number of birth control and contraceptive devices. This article from Yale university covers a long history of birth control.
The withdrawal method was quite popular, no doubt as it is the easiest and cheapest form of contraception to utilize.
The earliest known reference to a condom is found on a French cave painting dating back 12,000-15,000 years. Sheep gut condoms were also found in the walls of Dudley Castle in England. Source
Some prostitutes were also known to simply guide a man to a space between their thighs in an attempt to not actually have him penetrate her. Pornographic novels sang the praises of barrier devices like sealskin condoms and sponges dipped in an acidic liquid such as vinegar.
Use the search function. 1; 2. This gets asked every other week.
Here's a great answer:
I can hopefully give some new information on this question for the Middle Ages that hasn't been covered by the answers given below. I just finished a PhD on prostitution in the Middle Ages, and one of my chapters is based on a German legal case from 1471/2 in which a prostitute was investigated for having had an abortion in the brothel where she worked (as it turns out from the case documents, I think she was forced to have the abortion by the brothel-keeper so she could get back to earning money).
So, as far as contraception goes, evidence is pretty sketchy but it seems like prostitutes did make an effort to avoid getting pregnant by various means. One of them was to physically extract semen from themselves after they'd seen one or more clients by wrapping fabric around their fingers and then inserting it into themselves to basically scrape it out. This probably wasn't all that effective for obvious reasons :)
Most other methods were probably based around using herbal mixtures to make the women less likely to conceive, or even make them sterile - people do actually seem to have had pretty good knowledge of herbs and plants which can help prevent pregnancy. John Riddle has written a book on this called Eve's Herbs if anybody's interested.
Prostitutes might also take emmenagogues (menstrual stimulants) which had the effect of an early-term abortion if the woman in question were pregnant. In the case I looked at, this is what happened, and it's pretty clear that some brothel-keepers knew how to do this, and that prostitutes were also familiar with the ingredients needed. In this case, the mixture was made up of cloves, Queen Anne's Lace, periwinkle, and strong wine. The prostitute who took it was 20 weeks pregnant, so she aborted a pretty well-developed foetus :/
Prostitutes were only supposed to have sex in the missionary position, so it would have been pretty hard to avoid getting pregnant, but I guess it might have been possible sometimes to persuade customers not to ejaculate inside them. I found another case in which a guy was burned at the stake for having buttsex with a prostitute in a brothel, so I don't think non-vanilla sex was too common. Having said that, there is a really cool case from London from 1395 involving a male transvestite prostitute who was found working the streets alongside regular female prostitutes - it seems like he may have had anal sex with male clients (maybe that's what they were after...), so anal sex with prostitutes may not have been that unusual.
I hope that was helpful - like I said the evidence is really sketchy, but what we do know suggests that herbal contraceptive lore might have been quite well-developed and part of an experienced prostitute's business know-how. In the area I looked at (southern Germany and Switzerland) pregnant prostitutes were supposed to be put out of brothels, though in practice this risked losing money for brothel-keepers so it was not always enforced. Kids were born in brothels and some even lived there for short periods with their mothers. Interestingly, it was also theorised in the Middle Ages by the French scholastic philosopher William of Conches that prostitutes couldn't get pregnant because their wombs were so filled with dirt from all the bonin'.