Letters: Respect judges, don't bash them

Tell President Trump we do not bash judges. They cannot respond in kind. Under rules of judicial conduct, judges may not display bias or comment in public on cases. But it is not just that judges cannot fight back. Our independent judiciary is our bulwark of freedom.

Judges for the next four years who may hear cases involving the president, or even Trump hotels, should not fear his personal attacks. However a judge may feel, ethics requires the judge to treat litigants with respect, and in return the judge is entitled to respect.

|Ken Myers, Elkins Park, krmyers@alum.mit.edu

State Senate Bill 3 is a brazen attempt to restrict access to a legal medical procedure ("Abortion restriction bill passes committee," Feb. 7). As a physician, I witness the consequences of political interference in medical decisions. Criminalizing abortion after 19 weeks is illogical and unfair. For planned pregnancies, terminal fetal anomalies are often not discovered until later in pregnancy. When faced with an unplanned pregnancy or an unexpected path during a planned pregnancy, all options should be available.

When I became a physician, I committed to advising my patients based on medicine rather than ideology. Yet, politicians are forcing their ideology on patients, ignoring public health data, and telling physicians how we should practice medicine.

If the Affordable Care Act's coverage of contraception is repealed, we will undoubtedly see unplanned pregnancies and abortions rise. Women who choose to terminate their pregnancy will find a way, just as they did before Roe v. Wade, and they will die from unsafe abortions. Oppose this dangerous bill; women's lives are at stake.

|Cynthia Mollen, M.D., board chair, AccessMatters, Philadelphia, cmollen@icloud.comPitman

I lost a country when a madman was elected as a leader of Germany. My family left Latvia in 1944, just before Russia invaded and annexed that country. I am witnessing history repeating itself. I am too old to lose another country.

|Edgars Nilenders, Rockledge, e.nilenders@comcast.net

I have come across article after article about people who need therapy since Donald Trump became president. What they should do is thank our president for exposing their fragile psyches, then trace their past and find the scoundrels that broke them down into delicate and weak mental midgets.

The cultural elites that have brought us these linguini-spined psychotherapy patients should be ashamed of the product of all their collective wisdom. When I see young adults acting like little children that didn't get their way, I'm reminded of why I'm glad they didn't.

A country with an undercurrent of weak-minded young people left to marinate in such a feeble state is a country ripe for trouble. This shot of testosterone we are experiencing, reminds me of how a slug reacts to salt. Real people with a real life, take things in stride. We don't always get exactly what we want, and if we're honest, many times in life it worked to our advantage. Mature people know that.

|Ken Frank, Pitman

As he was signing edicts hurting one group after another over recent weeks, it was only a matter of time before President Trump got around to hurting animals - already the most oppressed sentient beings on earth. The animals' turn came with last week's shutdown of the website for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which reports on government regulation of roughly 9,000 animal handling facilities. These are laboratories, dog breeders, fur farms, circuses, zoos, and aquariums.

The site is used every day by animal protection activists to monitor government enforcement of the 1966 Animal Welfare Act, the only effective federal law protecting animals. Taking down the APHIS inspection site is a huge setback for animal protection. It will almost certainly lead to reduced government inspection of animal facilities and more animal suffering - a virtual repeal of the Animal Welfare Act.

Ironically, this oppressive act was launched by the same dark-of-night process as that of pulling more than 100,000 visas from thoroughly vetted Muslim immigrants one week earlier: no notice, no hearings, no due process, no public announcement. The oppressive mindset doesn't really care who the victims are. Hopefully, the courts will.

|Pavel Anistadt, Phiadelphia