Meet the Army Vet Protecting Women From Anti-Abortion Protesters

Dani Cook opened a multicolored umbrella to shield a toddler and his grandmother from the cameras of the right-to-life protesters as the two sat in a car behind Bristol Women’s Health in Virginia just across the border from Tennessee.

But there was nothing Cook could do as a volunteer with Stateline Abortion Access Partners to protect the child from what one of the protesters called out on the sunny morning of Sept. 9.

“Young child, if you can hear me, please know they have brought you to this wicked and evil place where they kill little babies,” the protester was recorded saying on a video taken at 9:17 am. “There’s a baby inside your mommy’s womb today and today they're going to poison your little brother or sister.”

The protester made a declaration that Cook had heard again and again during her five months as a volunteer escort at this facility, which had been located a half mile away in Tennessee until that state passed a near total ban.

“God’s law says it is wrong.”

Virginia still allowed abortion and in its Virginia location, the clinic became a prime focus of extreme right to lifers. The protesters wrote down license plates of cars parked outside. They also wore body cameras. And, before the owner of a neighboring house facing the facility allowed them to install there, one protester set up an 11-foot ladder.

“She would climb up the ladder with a super zoom lens camera and take pictures of patients and doctors going in and out of the clinic,” Cook told The Daily Beast. “And she doxes the doctors.”

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Cook has always been a defender of womens’ rights, but she had her own way of approaching the protesters.

“I don’t have to convince people of bodily autonomy or when a heartbeat is a heartbeat,” she told The Daily Beast. “People are always gonna argue that. So all I’m gonna do is challenge you on the thing that you say brought you here. Let’s talk about God for real.”

She would ask the protesters, “If God is who told you to be here, really? So, God said, ‘Strap on some body cams, and put cameras on the house next door?’ That’s God?”

Cook is a 50-year-old disabled Army veteran who was born and raised in Bristol, with a Black father and a white mother, bi-racial in a bi-state city. Her parents met in the military and settled in Bristol on the recommendation of a soldier who fought with her father during his combat tours in Vietnam. The father died at 32 from lung cancer. The mother raised Cook and her two brothers on her own. Cook has two daughters and three grandchildren. Her own faith has less to do with Bible thumping than with the beating of her heart.

“The core of what I believe is that no matter what name you call God, God is love and love is God,” she told The Daily Beast on Friday.

She would tell the protesters that what they were doing had nothing to do with love.

“And they would tell me, ‘Well, God is also wrath and justice,’” she recalled.

One of the protesters addressed her by name.

“She said, ‘Dani, what about the Black lives? You say Black lives matter. What about all the Black babies?’”

Cook inquired if the protester asked white escorts the same question.

“Do you only bring up race with me?” Cook asked her. “Maybe you ought to do a little prayer about that, because it seems to me all you saw when you saw me was race.”

Cook herself was a protester of another kind in 2019-2020 against a successful attempt to combine the region’s hospitals into a single monopoly. She had been among the demonstrators who camped for 257 days outside a medical facility.

Now she is one of the volunteers at Bristol Women’s Health who offer what protection they can with umbrellas. She also welcomes opportunities to challenge the right to lifers verbally, speaking calmly in the shared accent of someone born and raised in Bristol, but with a very different background and beliefs.

“Like my favorite thing to do is when one of them gets brave enough to say, ‘Hey, well will you talk to me?” she says. “My thing is. ‘Absolutely, I'll talk to you.’”

She recounted a typical exchange.

Cook: “Let me just ask you something because you say you're here for God, right?”

Protester: “Yeah.”

Cook: “Great. Me, too. So let’s just make sure we’re talking about the same God. Do you believe that God, um, is the creator and the giver of life? The source of life? “

Protester: “Yeah.”

Cook: “Perfect. Me too. Do you believe that God is all knowing? Does he know from our beginning to our end, what we’re gonna do before we do it?”

Protester: “Yes.”

Cook: “Me too. Do you believe that God is everywhere present?”

Protester: “Absolutely.”

Cook: “Do you believe that God is all powerful?”

Protester: “Yes.”

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Cook: “I do, too. So explain this to me; that would mean that at the time that God gives a woman what you would consider to be life, He knows whether or not she’s gonna have an abortion. He is present in the clinic when she does it, and he does not use his power to stop it. So could you share with me why you think you know better than God?”

The protester only stammers.

Cook: “You don’t have an answer, right? Right. Because you’re really not here for God.”

She then asks, “What do you think your yelling with a megaphone is doing? Do you think it’s helping? Probably not. I mean, like nobody’s ever went out of the clinic and said, ‘Oh my gosh, you made so much sense. I’m so glad you were here.’”

Protesters often try to counter with a question: “By what standard are you out here?”

They are asking her to cite a justification from scripture. Cook explained to The Daily Beast, “If it’s a standard that’s not in the Bible, it’s not something they believe in.”

Cook is quick to provide one.

“It’s real simple,” she recently told one protester. “The standard is, the Bible says to love thy neighbor as thyself and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. So I would hope that at one of the worst moments of my life, when I’m making the hardest decision possible, that someone would show me kindness and compassion, refrain from judgment, and just be there to support me in whatever way I might need. That is my standard.”

Some of the protesters use a megaphone to read scripture aloud outside the clinic. Cook was inspired to summon a voice to match it and commence when the protester did. She spoke with what a friend called “a preacher’s rhythm.

She recorded an example on video on Thursday.

“There are many people that profess to know God…” the protester with a megaphone said.

Cook began with the same words and continued by her own personal standard.

“... and they stand in judgment and condemnation of other people, and they read scriptures that are not on their hearts, but only in their minds and coming out of their mouth,” she said. “They have no idea that Jesus is actually empathy, compassionate love, and kindness.”

She was speaking of Christ in keeping with Christ’s actual teachings.

“They don’t understand that God’s law is something that has been replaced by Jesus’s grace and they don’t understand that God is forgiving, that God is loving, that God is kind, that he just desires for us to make our choices and then to come have our conversations with them,” she continued. “I’m just letting you know that there are people who believe that they know God so much that they stand on a hill and they scream scriptures through a megaphone.”

She noted as in other encounters with the protesters that they were disregarding the commandment about loving your neighbors. She asked how they would like it if somebody went to their home and wrote down license plate numbers and took pictures of everybody who came and went and followed them to their doctor’s appointments.

“Should we yell at you for your diabetes, for your heart disease, for your obesity?” Cook asked. “Should we do that for the way that you treat your godly vessel?”

On Friday, Karolina Ogorek, administrative director of Bristol Women’s Health, offered the highest praise for Cook and her efforts to make the patients feel protected in the face of wrath.

“Extraordinary,” Ogorek said.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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