Someone who really knows his/her mormon history, (the real kind, not the pseudo-history propagated by TSCC), posted this on a Free Thought Blog:

Some more Romney family history: the amazing life of Sarah M. Bates Pratt.

Sara Pratt was the first wife of Orson Pratt, Mitt Romney’s great great granduncle. She was excommunicated by the Mormon Church for her public condemnation of polygamy and the Church, apostasy, and her role in a sex scandal involving Romney’s relative and Joseph Smith himself!

In 1840, Joseph Smith told Sarah Bates he was attracted to her and intended to make her “one of his spiritual wives.” Bates refused Smith’s proposition, “I have one good husband, and that is enough for me”, and delivered an ultimatum to Smith: “Joseph, if you ever attempt any thing of the kind with me again, I will tell Mr. Pratt on his return home. Depend upon it, I will certainly do it.” Joseph Smith countered with a threat of personal destruction against Pratt:

Sister Pratt, I hope you will not expose me; if I am to suffer, all suffer; so do not expose me. … If you should tell, I will ruin your reputation, remember that.

Sarah told her husband about the incident; Orson took Sarah’s side and confronted Smith, who denied Sarah’s allegation and responded that she was the lover of his doctor, John Bennett. Numerous affidavits were then printed in the pro-Mormon Nauvoo, MO press denouncing Sarah Pratt as an adulteress.

After Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob for his scandalous polygamy, Sarah Pratt migrated with her husband and the other Mormons to Utah. Her personal experience with polygamy led her to be a founder of the Anti-Polygamy Society. Sarah Bates called herself a Mormon apostate because “I have not been a believer in the Mormon doctrines for thirty years.” She resolved to “rear my children so that they should never espouse the Mormon faith while concealing from my neighbors and the church authorities that I was thus rearing them.” Of her own husband Orson Pratt’s polygamy she said,

Here was my husband, gray headed, taking to his bed young girls in mockery of marriage. Of course there could be no joy for him in such an intercourse except for the indulgence of his fanaticism and of something else, perhaps, which I hesitate to mention.

Sarah Pratt also furnished an explanation of why Joseph Smith left no children from his plural wives. According to Pratt, Joseph Smith allowed his doctor John Bennett to perform abortions on Smith’s polygamous wives who were officially single. In a public charge “that was likely true,” according to author Andrew Smith, Bennett was accused by many of performing abortions, including Jospeh Smith’s older brother, Hyrum Smith. John Bennett said “that he could cause abortion with perfect safety to the mother at any stage of pregnancy, and that he had frequently destroyed and removed infants before their time to prevent exposure of the parties, and that he had instruments for that purpose.” If the women refused, Bennett stated that he came with Joseph Smith’s approval. Sarah Pratt recounted an incident in which

Bennett was en route to do ‘a little job for Joseph because one of his women was in trouble.’ Saying this, he took out 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 afterwards 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.

These facts all explain why the Sarah Pratt’s remarkable life is suppressed by the Mormons and undoubtedly the Romney family, as she is an important part of their family tree.

Link: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/29/mitt-romney-ghoul/comment-page-1/#comment-255959