Not before widespread birth control there isn’t. We can see quite clearly the first hints of the demographic transition in France. It starts off with delaying marriage but fertility within marriage basically being an increasing function of time. People had sex and this made babies. But then people stop having so many children. The pull out method was invented or spread society wide for the first time. Our knowledge of biology is not innate. The Romans got the fertile and infertile phases of the menstrual cycle exactly wrong. There are Amazonian peoples who believe in partible paternity so if a women has sex while pregnant a child can have more than one father. Whores in medieval England thought fast sex was non-procreative.
Historically if you weren’t celibate there was going to be a baby.
Even in the relatively abundant west world today 70% of infertility may be caused by diet (https://www.healthstatus.com/health_blog/ovulation-2/diet-an...). In the past poor people had even worse diets, it was probably even worse for the post famine Irish you used as an example.
> Our knowledge of biology is not innate
It's not,but we've known what the result of "seeding a woman" has been for several thousand years so I have a hard time believing it took that long to come up with the pull out method. For the poor bedrooms are also a recent invention, they probably got a lot more sex-ed passed down directly.
