What Ancient Humans Did About Unwanted Pregnancy

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is walking into a pharmacy, picking up a small plastic packet, and paying less than the price of a sandwich. Inside that packet is a technology so precise it can override one of the most powerful biological systems your body has ever produced. But for most of human history, that packet didn't exist. The pharmacy didn't exist.

[00:00:17]The science behind it didn't exist. And yet the problem it solves did. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have been having sex. And for hundreds of thousands of years, humans have been trying to figure out what to do when that sex made something they weren't ready for. The methods they came up with will change everything you think you know about how desperate, how creative, and how ruthless your ancestors actually were. The oldest written instructions for preventing pregnancy come from a scrap of papyrus found in Egypt. It's called the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus, and it dates to roughly 1825 BCE. That makes it almost 4,000 years old. It was discovered in 1889 by British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie at a site called El-Lahun. And when scholars finally translated it, what they found inside read less like ancient mysticism and more like a clinical manual. It contained 34 sections dedicated to women's health, diagnosis, treatment, fertility, and contraception. One of the recipes called for crocodile dung. You mix it with fermented dough, shape it into a pessary, and insert it. To a modern reader, this sounds insane. But here's the thing, crocodile dung is naturally alkaline. When placed inside the vaginal canal, it changes the pH, making the environment hostile to sperm.

[00:01:21]It also acted as a crude physical barrier. The Egyptians didn't know the chemistry. They didn't have the vocabulary. But they had trial and error, generation after generation, until they stumbled on something that actually worked. Another recipe from roughly the same period, this one preserved in the Ebers Papyrus from around 1550 BCE, called for a mixture of acacia gum, honey, and dates. You soaked lint or shredded fiber in the mixture and used it the same way. Modern pharmacologists have tested acacia gum and found that when it ferments, it produces lactic acid, a compound that kills sperm on contact. Lactic acid is still used in some commercial spermicides today. The Egyptians figured this out nearly 3,500 years ago by hand, without microscopes, without labs, without any understanding of what a cell even was. They just knew it worked, but Egypt was not alone. By the time we reach ancient Greece and Rome, preventing pregnancy had become something closer to a science. In the 2nd century CE, a physician named Soranus of Ephesus wrote what is considered the most important gynecological text of the ancient world.

[00:02:17]It's simply called gynecology. Inside it, he drew a line that most people at the time didn't bother to draw. He separated contraception from abortion. A contraceptive, he wrote, prevents conception from happening. An abortifacient destroys what has already been conceived. And then he added something that still reads like modern medical advice. It is much more advantageous not to conceive than to destroy the embryo. Soranus recommended smearing the cervix with old olive oil, honey, or cedar resin before intercourse to block sperm. He suggested inserting a lock of fine wool as a physical barrier.

[00:02:46]He told women to stand up immediately after sex, squat, sneeze, and drink something cold. Some of this sounds absurd, but the barrier methods, the oils, the viscous plugs, those worked on the same principles as a modern cervical cap. He was 1,900 years early, but the most extraordinary ancient contraceptive wasn't a paste or a plug. It was a plant. In the ancient city of Cyrene, on the coast of what is now Libya, there grew a species from the fennel family that the Greeks and Romans considered the single most valuable plant on Earth.

[00:03:13]They called it silphium. It was used as a seasoning, a perfume, and a medicine, but its most famous use was as a contraceptive. Women consumed it orally, either the sap or the seeds, and ancient physicians documented its effectiveness at preventing pregnancy so consistently that it became one of Cyrene's most important exports. The city built its entire economy around it. They put silphium on their coins. Silver coins minted in Cyrene show the plant stock on one side and its seed pod on the other.

[00:03:37]That seed pod has a very specific shape.

[00:03:39]It looks like a heart, not the organ, the symbol. Some historians have proposed that the modern heart shape, the one you text to people, the one on Valentine's cards, may trace its origin back to the seed pod of an ancient birth control plant. The theory is debated, but the coins are real. You can see them in museum. What happened to silphium is one of the oldest ecological tragedies in recorded history. Demand was so high that the plant was harvested faster than it could grow. Ancient writers reported that it resisted cultivation. It only grew wild in a narrow strip of coastal land. By the 1st century CE, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder recorded that only a single stalk of silphium had been found in living memory. It was sent to Emperor Nero as a curiosity. After that, the plant disappears from the historical record entirely. It is considered the first recorded human-caused extinction.

[00:04:22]We wanted it so badly that we erased it from the earth. In 2021, a researcher named Mohammad Miski at Istanbul University proposed that a related species called Ferula drudeana, found growing on a mountainside in Turkey, might be a surviving relative of silphium. Its appearance matches the coins. Its chemistry shows anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties. But whether it truly is the lost plant remains an open question.

[00:04:43]When prevention failed, the options became darker. Across the ancient world, women turned to herbal abortifacients.

[00:04:49]Pennyroyal, a small plant in the mint family, was one of the most widely used.

[00:04:53]It was brewed into tea or distilled into concentrated oil. It stimulated uterine contractions and could end an early pregnancy. It could also destroy the liver. The margin between the dose that terminated a pregnancy and the dose that killed the woman was razor thin. Tansy, rue, black hellebore, and savin were used the same way. Knowledge of these plants was held by midwives and healers and passed down in whispers from mother to daughter. Some ancient physicians documented a different approach. Wild carrot seeds, from the plant we now call Queen Anne's Lace, were recorded by Hippocrates around 400 BCE as a method for preventing implantation if taken shortly after intercourse. Modern studies have found that wild carrot seeds contain compounds that interfere with progesterone, the hormone a fertilized egg needs to attach to the uterine wall. Hippocrates didn't know what progesterone was. He just knew the seeds worked if you took them in time.

[00:05:39]Soranus himself documented physical methods. Vigorous jumping, heavy lifting, riding animals hard, long walks, all recommended to dislodge an early pregnancy through force. He also described sitz baths and herbal decoctions of wormwood, fenugreek, and mallow. And crucially, he warned against using instruments. The risk of puncturing the uterus, he wrote, was too great. For a physician writing in the 2nd century, he understood something that would take the rest of the world centuries to accept. The body is fragile, and desperation makes people reckless. But what happened when none of it worked? When the herbs failed, the barrier failed, the plant was gone, and the pregnancy continued to term. The answer is a part of ancient life that modern humans find hardest to process.

[00:06:18]In ancient Rome, when a child was born, it was placed on the ground at the feet of the father. If he picked it up, the child was accepted into the family. If he didn't, it was taken outside and left. This was called exposure. It was not illegal. It was not rare. It was standard practice. The father, as the head of the household, held a legal right called patria potestas, power over the life and death of every person in his family, including newborns. Girls were exposed more often than boys.

[00:06:41]Disabled infants were exposed more often than healthy ones. Philosophers endorsed it. Plato and Aristotle both argued that deformed children should not be raised.

[00:06:49]It was considered a service to the state. We have a letter. It was found in the ruins of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and dates to 1 BCE. It is written by a man named Hilarion to his wife Alice. He is working in Alexandria. She is pregnant.

[00:07:01]He writes to her with affection. He tells her not to worry. He says he will send money as soon as he's paid. And then, in the same breath, in the same sentence, he writes this, "If it is a male, let it live. If it is a female, expose it." He signs the letter the way you'd sign a grocery list. There is no guilt in the handwriting, no hesitation.

[00:07:17]This was simply what people did. Some exposed infants were found. Some were adopted. Many were collected by slavers and raised to be sold. And many simply died. In medieval Europe, foundling hospitals were built specifically because the streets had become crowded with abandoned newborns. The problem was so severe that the Catholic Church installed rotating wooden doors in the walls of convents called foundling wheels, where a mother could place her infant anonymously and ring a bell. That system operated in parts of Europe until the late 1800s. For most of human history, preventing an unwanted pregnancy was not a political debate. It was a survival problem, and the solutions were brutal, creative, chemically sophisticated, and often lethal. Your ancestors packed crocodile dung into their bodies. They drank mint tea that could stop their hearts. They harvested a plant so aggressively they wiped it off the planet. They left their own children in the dirt, not because they were monsters, because the alternative was starvation, exile, or a death they couldn't afford. The pharmacy on the corner didn't just give you convenience.

[00:08:13]It gave you something your ancestors would have traded everything for. A choice that doesn't kill you. That's all for today. Anyway, please donate or subscribe to fund the next video.