Concubines across ancient civilizations used a wide range of methods to prevent pregnancy, from herbal drinks and toxic mineral concoctions to physical barriers inserted before intercourse. Some of these methods had real pharmacological effects, while others were dangerously poisonous, and many did both. The specific techniques varied by culture and era, but the toolkit was surprisingly extensive.
Herbal and Plant-Based Methods
Plants were the most common form of fertility control available to concubines and other women in the ancient world. Some of these had genuine anti-fertility properties that modern science has confirmed, while others worked primarily through toxicity, essentially poisoning the body enough to prevent or end a pregnancy.
One of the most famous ancient contraceptives was silphium, a plant from the North African city of Cyrene that was so valued by the Greeks and Romans it was harvested to extinction. Ancient physicians including Soranus of Ephesus and Dioscorides described it as both an oral contraceptive and an abortifacient. Women would drink preparations made from its resin or sap. The demand was so intense that by the first century CE, Pliny the Elder noted the Cyrenean variety no longer existed.
Pomegranate was another widely used plant. Soranus, a Greek physician practicing in Rome around the second century CE, prescribed pomegranate rind as a contraceptive pessary (a substance inserted vaginally before intercourse). Interestingly, modern studies have found that pomegranate does have anti-fertility qualities, but these properties reside in the skin, not the seeds. Soranus got the right part of the fruit.
In China, the traditional pharmacopoeia listed dozens of substances believed to prevent or end pregnancy. Li Shizhen’s sixteenth-century Compendium of Materia Medica catalogs a large number of herbal, animal, and mineral substances for this purpose. Commonly used plants included motherwort herb, ox knee root, musk, cinnamon, and the blister beetle mylabris. These were taken orally, applied as vaginal suppositories, or even worn as abdominal plasters. Musk was sometimes simply carried on the body, based on the belief that proximity alone could cause a woman to lose a pregnancy.
Toxic Minerals and Their Costs
Some of the most effective (and most dangerous) contraceptive methods involved heavy metals. Chinese concubines drank preparations containing liquid mercury or lead to control fertility. These substances could indeed prevent pregnancy, but through a blunt mechanism: they poisoned the reproductive system. The result was often permanent sterility or death.
In the Roman world, white lead was mixed into ointments applied to the cervix before intercourse. Soranus recommended moist cerate (a waxy preparation) containing white lead as one option for preventing conception. Lead is a potent reproductive toxin that disrupts hormonal signaling and can prevent implantation, so these preparations likely had some real contraceptive effect, at a steep cost to the woman’s long-term health.
The line between “contraceptive” and “poison that happens to prevent pregnancy” was thin. Many of the substances Chinese women used, including croton seed, monkshood root, nux vomica, and centipede, are genuinely toxic. A fictional but culturally revealing account from the Ming dynasty novel *Jinpingmei* describes a concubine taking an abortifacient mixture of blister beetle, liquid mercury, musk, and several toxic herbs. This mixture reflects real practices documented in legal and medical records of the period.
Physical Barriers and Pessaries
Barrier methods were common in the ancient Mediterranean world. Roman women inserted pessaries, small plugs of material placed at the opening of the cervix, before intercourse. These worked through two mechanisms: physically blocking sperm from entering the uterus, and creating a chemical environment hostile to sperm through acidic or astringent ingredients.
Soranus provided several pessary recipes. His favored ingredients included pomegranate rind, oak gall (a tannin-rich growth found on oak trees), and various minerals. Some pessaries were designed to “close up the womb,” acting as a physical seal, while others were meant to heat and irritate the cervical opening so it would reject sperm. Old olive oil and myrtle oil were also applied externally to the cervix before sex. These oily substances would have created a partial physical barrier, similar in concept to modern spermicidal gels, though far less reliable.
Timing and Withdrawal
Beyond substances and devices, behavioral methods played a role. Withdrawal before ejaculation was practiced across nearly every ancient civilization. In imperial harems, eunuchs or attendants sometimes kept records of when concubines were visited by the emperor, partly to track paternity but also to manage which women were permitted to conceive. In some courts, only favored concubines were allowed to carry pregnancies to term. Others would be given herbal preparations afterward.
Calendar-based timing was also attempted, though ancient understanding of the fertile window was largely inaccurate. Soranus, for instance, believed a woman was most fertile immediately after menstruation, which is close to correct for some women but far from a reliable contraceptive strategy.
Abortion as a Backup
In practice, many concubines relied on abortion when prevention failed. The distinction between contraception and early abortion was blurry in most ancient medical traditions. Chinese medical texts used the euphemism “drugs to unblock the menses” for substances that could end an early pregnancy, and these were widely available to elite women. The methods ranged from oral drugs to vaginal suppositories made from combinations of musk, borax, and camphor, formed into small balls and inserted.
Legal records from imperial China document cases of women using these methods, along with the injuries and deaths that sometimes resulted. Mylabris (blister beetle) was a particularly notorious abortifacient used in the Chinese countryside and among elites alike. Medical texts of the period warned against many of these substances precisely because of the fatalities they caused, suggesting they were common enough to be a recognized public health problem.
How Effective Were These Methods
Reliability varied enormously. Barrier methods like pessaries offered moderate protection, especially those containing astringent or acidic plant compounds that would have reduced sperm viability. Silphium was reportedly effective enough to drive its own extinction through demand, though we can’t verify its actual contraceptive potency since the plant no longer exists. Herbal preparations containing genuine hormonal disruptors, like pomegranate rind, had some real pharmacological basis.
The toxic mineral methods “worked” in the sense that mercury and lead reliably damage the reproductive system, but they did so by harming the entire body. A woman drinking mercury preparations would eventually become infertile, but she’d also accumulate organ damage, neurological problems, and a shortened lifespan. For concubines in imperial courts, where becoming pregnant without permission could be politically dangerous or even fatal, these trade-offs were sometimes considered acceptable. The methods were brutal, often harmful, and inconsistently effective, but they were also remarkably varied and, in some cases, grounded in genuine biological mechanisms that modern science has since confirmed.