I was reading about Henry VIII's court, and there seems to be an awful lot of girls sleeping with the King, but the impression I get is that there were also a lot of young noblewomen (or at least, courtly women, who I guess were not necessarily noble) sleeping with noblemen. Is that a correct impression? Mary Boleyn was known as "the great prostitute" and apparently known for sleeping with many, many men (though perhaps she was the exception rather than the rule, hence the nickname). Presumably, the married ones claimed any pregnancies were their husbands, but what about the unmarried ones?
I don't know if there is significant documentation of it but the use of abortifacients (often given by midwives) were at least prevalent enough for Christian theologians to discuss it in late-Western Rome. e.g. Jerome, Letter 22 — to Euchtochium (384 AD):
Some go so far as to take potions, that they may insure barrenness, and thus murder human beings almost before their conception. Some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use drugs to procure abortion [aborti venena meditantur], and when (as often happens) they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder.
For an in-depth mid-18th century New England (CT) case study of a woman's failed abortifacient use that led to a fatal surgical abortion see: Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village by Cornelia H. Dayton. Excerpt of note:
Perhaps the most intriguing question centers on why women and men in early America acted covertly to effect abortions when abortion before quickening was legal. The Grosvenor case highlights the answer that applies to most known incidents from the period: abortion was understood as blameworthy because it was an extreme action designed to hide a prior sin, sex outside of marriage. Reading the depositions it is nearly impossible to disentangle the players' attitudes toward abortion itself from their expressions of censure or anxiety over failed courtship, illegitimacy, and the [health] dangers posed for a young woman by a secret abortion. Strikingly absent from these 18th century documents, however, is either outrage over the destruction of a fetus or denunciations of those who would arrest "nature's proper course." Those absences are a telling measure of how the discourse about abortion would change dramatically in later centuries.
According to Dayon, "trade" was New England youth slang that referred to abortifacients, derived from general usage of "trade" as "stuff or goods . . . often in the deprecatory sense of rubbish and trash".
I'm not entirely sure about Dayton's idea about there not being "outrage over the destruction of a fetus" though, considering Jerome's stance. (which was shared by Tertullian and Augustine — the latter of course having a major influence on Anglican and Calvinist/Puritan theology) Perhaps, as most literate people in early modern England were not reading early Christian theology, such views on abortion were just not common in general society. I'll leave it to someone with more knowledge to fill in that gap.
sources:
NPNF2-06. Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome, trans. Freemantle (latin text)
Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. "Taking the Trade: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village." The William and Mary Quarterly 48.1 (1991), p. 19-49.