I've felt like we've been talking past one another, and your latest response confirms this. More below.
Sethbag wrote:I don't assume that Joseph Smith had abortions. My main point, in response to your posts specifically, is just that I don't believe that using the abortion angle to cast doubt on the reliability of the Sarah Pratt account is a very strong argument.
<Picture a very puzzled looking icon here> What?? This thread is about "the abortion angle." Sarah Pratt's testimony was brought up only in that context.
And I didn't 'use' the abortion claim to cast doubt on Sarah Pratt's testimony. Rather, I pointed out that the late, biased, and otherwise problematic nature of Sarah Pratt's testimony, combined with her being the lone source for Joseph Smith procuring abortions and the uneasy fit between his alleged use of abortion and his procreative rationale for polygamy, lessen the value of her testimony, particularly on this point.
For whatever it matters, I consider Sarah Pratt a valuable source. But, like all sources, what she had to say must be used carefully as evidence rather than relied on as an "authority."
That's all I'm saying. He may have used abortion a few times, or he may not. But saying that Pratt's account is unreliable because she mentioned that Joseph Smith used abortion, and you believe it is unlikely that Joseph Smith used abortion, and therefor Pratt's account is contradicted by low probability, is weak in this case, because something or set of things accounts for Joseph Smith's relatively low baby count considering all the women he probably slept with, and I think I've shown, or at least argued well, for abortion being as likely, or at least not unlikely, as a lot of other things that it could also have been. I don't think Pratt's account can be deemed unreliable because she claims Joseph Smith used abortion.
Great. Then we agree on what seems to you to be the centrail issue--that the overall value of Sarah Pratt's testimony doesn't hinge on her abortion claim. I would go further and say that, rather, the value of her abortion claim hinges in part on the overall value of her testimony, which is late and unabashedly biased. And since she is the only source saying Joseph Smith used abortions, since we would expect someone other than a biased interviewee four decades later to intimate something about this, and since her claim fits poorly with how Joseph Smith obtained polygamous wives and sex in the first place, her late and biased testimony is quite insufficient to make the abortion claim anything more than one possibility among others, and not an especially strong possibility at that.
Don