Tuesday, April 14, 2020

The Death of Diamond Williams

As I'm going through my commentaries on the book, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer, I've been catching up on things I should have been blogging. Today I'm going to do adequate posts about two of the women that have died since the release of the Grand Jury Report in the Gosnell case. Judge Renee Cardwell Hughes specified that the report must in no way implicate the abortion establishment in any way. She made a choice to withhold information that would warn women of systemic problems in the abortion establishment. I hold her partially responsible for these women's deaths.

Diamond Williams
Diamond Williams was one of those women. Diamond, an 18-year-old African-American woman with diabetes and obesity, went to Carolina Center for Women (a National Abortion Federation member clinic) to undergo an abortion at 6.5 weeks of pregnancy on Saturday, January 23, 2016. She was a high-risk patient due to her health issues.

Diamond and her mother, Sharika, arrived early in the morning. Sharika sat in the waiting room all day. Nobody told her what was happening with her daughter.

Finally the clinic staff began to turn out the lights to close the clinic. Sharika had to pound on the glass at the receptionist's station to get somebody's attention. They had her walk around to a side door to meet Diamond and take her home.

Diamond was in a lot of pain that night, so Sharika called the clinic's after-hours number. She was reassured that the pain was normal. As long as there was no bleeding or fever, there was nothing to worry about.

Diamond was still in a lot of pain on Monday, so she called the clinic asking to schedule a follow-up visit. She was told that a nurse would call her back. That call never came.

On Tuesday evening, Diamond appeared to be feeling a little bit better, but she was still in pain so her mother made plans to take her to their primary care physician in the morning. Diamond headed to her room to get ready for bed. Then Sharika heard her daughter scream. She ran to find Diamond lying face-down, foaming at the mouth and unable to speak. The family called 911, and the operator thought Diamond was probably having a seizure.

When EMS arrived, the interpreted the family's hysteria as aggression and wouldn't enter the house until police arrived and the other children and the family dog were secured in a bedroom.

Sharika said that the medics didn't seem to be doing much to help her daughter other than just trying to get her to stand up. They finally rolled her onto a body bag, dragged her to the back patio, and lifted her onto a gurney. Sharika rode to the hospital with the police officer. At the hospital she was left alone in a room. A chaplain came and prayed with her while she waited to hear from the doctor.

Finally a doctor came and told Sharika that Diamond had a pulse and was being transferred to the Intensive Care Unit. She was allowed to visit her daughter briefly and described her as "bleeding from everywhere." Diamond died on January 27.

The autopsy was performed at the hospital. Sharika had to get a lawyer and wrangle for a year to get a copy of the autopsy report, and even then she was only provided with the last four pages of a 62-page report. It didn't note a cause of death or manner of death but did note diagnoses of amniotic fluid embolism (AFE) and Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation (DIC), a disorder in which the body's clotting factors in the blood are out of whack. One form of the disorder results in the sort of bleeding Sharika saw when Diamond was in the ICU. DIC can be triggered by an amniotic fluid embolism.

It seems strange that Diamond would suffer an amniotic fluid embolism from an abortion performed that early in the pregnancy.

Strangely enough, though Diamond had been diagnosed with DIC and AFE, the provisional cause of death was bronchopneumonia.

As Sharika tried to pursue a malpractice case against the clinic -- which refused to tell her the name of the physician -- she learned that her attorney had a conflict of interest because he also represented the clinic in other cases. To make things even harder, the clinic changed its name.

I've been unable to find any further information about Diamond's death.



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