Birth control and abortion did take place in the Middle Ages and, like today, there were many medical and ethical issues that medieval people had to contend with.
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In the Middle Ages you will find many opinions about what should or shouldn't be done when it came to preventing pregnancies. However, the medieval period might be unique in that it is perhaps the only time when you can read the same author in one work condemning the use of birth control and in another giving directions on how to use it.
Religious values held the most important influence on the use of birth control, before and after one conceives. Taking their cue from the Biblical commandment to “Be fruitful, and multiply,” medieval Christianity saw the sole purpose of sex as a means to conceive children. Therefore, the idea that one could use birth control to stop conception was usually harshly condemned (and often equated as being the same as abortion). One ninth-century text, explains, “a woman who has taken a magic potion, however many times she would otherwise have become pregnant and given birth, must recognize herself to be guilty of homicide.”
However, other texts suggest that the reasons why a woman was using contraception could be a mitigating factor. The eleventh-century Decretum by Burchard of Worms explains, “It makes a big difference if a poor little woman does it on account of the difficulty of feeding, or whether a fornicator does it to conceal her crime.”
In his article ‘Birth-Control in the West in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,’ Pete Billar offers this interesting observation about the acceptability of contraception in medieval Europe:
One which seems to demand attention is the catch-phrase well known in the early modern period but also popular in the middle ages: Si non caste tamen caute, translated literally, “If not chastely at least cautiously / with care / with precautions”; a phrase disconcertingly reminiscent of the modern “If you can't be good be careful.” Found earliest, to my knowledge, in 1049, this phrase is a commonplace in the thirteenth century. Like the modern catchphrase it seems adaptable and changeable in meaning. Thus in one early fourteenth-century English translation it seems to refer simply to discretion in talk about an illicit sexual relationship.
On the other hand in its appearance in one text emanating from the diocese of Passau c. 1266, which describes how parish priests make light of fornication by warning people to act “with care (caution)” if not chastely, it jostles with other passages, relating, for example, to women and childbirth, and priests questioning people about sexual practices and thereby instructing them in these practices, and this context suggests that this catch-phrase, encountered in Germany, England, and Italy, could perhaps mean by caution the “precautions” of contraceptive behavior: possible evidence of a popular, coarsely humorous contraceptive mentality ?
Meanwhile, in the medieval Islamic world contraception was generally viewed as permissible. Hadith accounts noted that coitus interruptus was practiced during the time of the Prophet Muhammad and not condemned. The eleventh-century Muslim theologian al-Ghazali added that while it was best left in God's hands, such practices were acceptable because of "the fear of incurring great financial hardship on account of the size of one's family."