In "primitive" economies a rise in population can largely be equated to a rise in economic development. When the economy was moving along smoothly, people (in northern nuclear families but also in the South) in general tended to move out the parental home earlier and marry earlier, thus increasing birth rate. When the economy was in not so good a state, the inverse happened, thus lowering birth rate. I say this to show that societies have always had what we can call "natural birth control" (Malthus even speaks of "moral restraint", which can be attributed to clergy etc.).

Infanticide and abortion seem to have very much been a common (albeit often secretive) form of birth control. There are several studies on this, mostly regarding the later middle ages and the early modern period, as the sources preceding those periods do not allow for deep going research.

R. Roth claims that infanticide can be seen as a smooth graph, moving along relative to the birth rates. Meaning that when birth rates go up, so would infanticide. Many historians also note a general stigmatisation of infanticide after the 1520s, leading to increased prosecution. It seems a general consensus that infanticide still increased most in the 1600s, while the following century the numbers would fall. In general, infanticide would also rise when local or central governments made the abandonment of children harder.

A very interesting study is one by Laura Hynes, who investigates infanticide in Parma from 1609 to 1637. She concludes that infanticide was incredibly common and could take more than 5% of all children's (edit: by this i mean newborns) lives. She also notes that the urban poor of Parma mostly kept girls, while the surrounding rural areas mostly kept boys.