In 1980, archaeologists working at Herculaneum (just down the coast from Pompeii) discovered a series of "boat sheds," low vaulted structures arrayed along the ancient beach. During the eruption of Vesuvius, nearly 300 people, unwilling or unable to escape, had sheltered in the sheds, hoping for rescue from a passing boat. Death found them there in the middle of the night, when a wave of superheated gas rolled over the city. Pyroclastic flows soon covered the remains with up to 60 feet of volcanic debris. As archaeologists began to remove the rubble, they found the bones of the refugees in superb condition, and turned them over to a physical anthropologist for close study. The Herculaneans in the boat sheds, it appeared, had come from all walks of life. There was a wealthy man, with the gym-toned muscles and soft hands of a leisurely life. There was a Roman soldier, bones seamed with old injuries. And there were two women who, to judge from their badly scarred pelvic joints, had earned their living as prostitutes. One of these women, in her late forties, had clearly borne four or five children.

Most prostitutes were slaves or freedwomen; those who were freeborn came from the ranks of the poor. Unless they happened to become the mistress of a prominent man (typically their owner), they had little hope of escaping a dangerous and degrading career. Like actors and gladiators, they were regarded as the dregs of society, and were banned from marrying any freeborn Roman. From the reign of Caligula onward, to add financial strain to social exclusion, they were subject to a special tax.

Few working prostitutes had the resources to raise a family. Even if they were free, or were enslaved but allowed to keep a portion of their earnings, they only earned (to judge from the going rates at Pompeii) between 2 and 16 asses per customer (by way of comparison, a loaf of bread cost 2 asses). And few pimps, we can imagine, would have allowed prostitutes to keep children around the brothel.

Pregnancy, in other words, was probably seen as a disaster. Prostitutes used more or less ineffective contraceptives. When these failed, as they invariably did, most carried their children to term, since abortions (herbal, very occasionally surgical) were highly dangerous. Occasionally - if we can believe Procopius' slanderous stories about the courtesan-turned-empress Theodora - babies were given to their fathers. Typically, however, the child's fate would depend on the mother's status. If she was a slave, her children were automatically her master's property, and had a reasonable chance of being raised in his household. If she was free, her pimp would probably force her to either give the child to a friend or expose it.

Exposure was probably the fate of many children born to prostitutes. The child would be swaddled, carried to a public place (often a temple gate or a dungheap outside the gates), and left there. Mothers hoped that their children would be adopted by childless passers-by. Often, however, abandoned babies were picked up by slave traders. Many would be raised as prostitutes.

"Patchwork families."

I love Ann-Cathrin Harders' term for it, and I should've thought to include it in my recent answer on single mothers in medieval Europe. One of the most important things it shows is: contraception and infanticide were not the only option.

With such messy and depressing mortality rates in the ancient and medieval world--and we're not just talking about death in childbirth here, which was less common than you probably think--even wealthy children had a strong chance of losing their father by mid-adolescence. A family which the father possessed was certainly the ideal, but it was by far not a given.

If we're talking about "well-regarded" sex workers, which I interpret as "with more resources," I think single mothers is a good model to start with, especially regarding children once born. Roman sexual relationships were already more fluid than we might think of today, and children born out of wedlock were common enough to have a single word designating them in law: spurii. (Which, as the root of our "spurious," does not have the best of connotations today.)

Women in the ancient and medieval worlds often cultivated a strong network of female family and friends. It was to them that single mothers tended to turn. Essentially adoptive mothers, stepmothers, aunts and uncles raising children--this was not the norm, but it was normal.

Hence Harders' "patchwork families," with the emphasis on families.

Would sex workers be treated any differently after giving birth to a child? ...Why would they?

A second option was, indeed, abortion. Many, many recipes for contraceptives and abortifacients are presented in classical medical texts--all the herbal combinations you could want. John Riddle, one of the major scholars working on birth control and abortion in ancient and medieval Europe, even suggests that some may have had at least a slight impact on the probability of preventing pregnancy or producing an abortion.

Three problems, though: literacy, access to texts, and access to ingredients.

...On the other hand, contraceptives and abortifacients tend to be recipes--whether or not the same ones recorded exclusively by men--passed down or provided by other women as oral tradition.

And then there is That Topic in scholarship, the one where scholars go round and round in circles: infanticide.

As /u/kooking_pot discusses in this thread, archaeological evidence from Ashkelon can easily be interpreted as demonstrating a common practice of infanticide. Also not Pompeii, but in the Roman Empire (England), some scholars have suggested that a burial site containing the bodies of 97 babies demontrates systematic infanticide as well. Significantly for our purposes, the general assumption by these scholars is that the burial site/cemetery marks a brothel. Other scholars, Dominic Wilkinson points out, simply see a burial site for infants whose bodies were buried, not cremated.

There is plenty of strong evidence, however, to show that some women certainly left their children "exposed"--but not necessarily in our view of the little baby on the mountaintop torn apart by wolves. Rome, at least, even had specific locations for parents or their delegates to leave babies they could not or would not raise--think of our Safe Spaces today, even. W.V. Harris points out that the intention was typically rescue, not death, if you consider that infants were often even clothed.

And in literature (which albeit is, well, literature), these babies are indeed often rescued.

So, as an ancient Roman sex worker with some financial resources who found herself pregnant, a woman had real choices for her body, and perhaps later for her baby.

~~

Further Reading:

• Ann-Cathrin Harders, "Roman Patchwork Families: Surrogate Parenting, Socialization, and the Shaping of Tradition," in Children, Memory, and Family Identity in Roman Culture, ed. Véronique Dasen and Thomas Späth (2010)

• Dominic Wilkinson, "Exposure and Infanticide in Ancient Rome," in his own Death or Disability?: The 'Carmentis Machine' and Decision-Making for Critically Ill Children (2013)

• John Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (1992)