Transcription
You're going to want to watch this short three-minute clip because it proves two things. First, that the stories and testimonies of the women claiming to be Joseph's wives decades after he died are full of untruths. And second, the stories of John Bennett being Joseph's personal abortionist in 1841 and 1842 are utterly impossible.
The claim that John Bennett was providing abortions for Joseph Smith. So the main testimony I know of for this claim, or may really the only one, is Sarah Pratt. She claimed that one day while talking to Bennett, I observed that he held something in the left sleeve of his coat. Bennett smiled and said, "Oh, a little job for Joseph. One of his women is in trouble." Saying this, he took the thing out of his left sleeve. It was a pretty long instrument of a kind I had never seen before. It seemed to be of steel and was crooked at one end. I heard afterward that the operation had been performed, that the woman was very sick, and that Joseph was very much afraid that she might die, but she recovered.
Okay, let's look at this claim, right? So again, a D&C is a dilation and curettage, right? There are two tools needed for it: a dilator, a cervical dilator, and what's called a curette. So Sarah claimed that John showed her a curette. That's what that would have been on his way to perform an abortion for Joseph. A couple of pieces we need to look at. John Bennett left Nauvoo in 1842, right? So this would have had to be in early 1842 or before that he had a curette. So here's the problem: the curette was not invented until 1843 by a doctor in France. So no curette would have existed before 1843, and certainly no curette would have existed in America until several years after that. For Sarah to say that John Bennett showed her a curette completely eliminates her testimony right there.
Here's the problem. It's it's interesting, you know, anachronism. A lot of people who reject the Book of Mormon, again, based on anachronisms, are fine accepting this testimony of Sarah Pratt. By 1886, when Sarah Pratt gave this testimony, D&Cs would be widely available in America for the most part. She could very well have been familiar with one. She might have even had one, who knows? So she had her 1886 body of knowledge that she mistakenly tried to apply to a testimony of something that happened in or before 1842. And by doing that, she got herself in trouble. We know that this testimony is completely false, and it needs to be soundly, once and for all, completely rejected.
I have to say, I am actually amazed that this research hasn't been done before. That no one has looked into these claims and studied them out in this way. I I guess at the same time, I'm really excited that it hasn't been done before because it's really fun to get to be the one to do it. But it's amazing that we have just accepted these things without investigating them, without approaching them with any degree of critical thought, right? So can we please agree, at the very least, first, that Sarah Pratt's testimony and the idea that John Bennett was an abortion provider for Joseph Smith needs to be completely rejected? And beyond that, the reason I have gone into such depth to really demonstrate the development of contraception in America is so we could also completely take this argument off the table. Nobody should ever say it again. It is not sound. It is not true. And my hope is that going forward, people will be embarrassed to make these claims because they have been proven utterly impossible and completely false.