GOP Rep. Scott Perry Flip-Flops On Whether He Backs A National Abortion Ban

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) has been making a point lately of telling voters that he doesn’t support a nationwide abortion ban.

In a Thursday interview with a local news station, FOX43, Perry said he agrees with former President Donald Trump that abortion rights should be decided by individual states. That’s effectively what conservatives on the Supreme Court decided in June 2022 when they struck down Roe v. Wade.

“I think it’s the appropriate one,” he said of Trump’s position. “Let’s honor the court’s decision, and then have the states figure that out so that we have those decisions being made locally, where they should be.”

Perry, a former chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, said the same thinga few weeks earlier at a Republican political conference in his state, emphasizing that he opposes a national abortion ban and supports fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization. Both topics have been hotly debated ― and will be major campaign issues in the November elections ― in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision, as well asthe Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in February to define frozen embryos as “children.”

But the Pennsylvania Republican is hoping nobody notices that he’s signed on to legislation in Congress for the last seven years to impose a near-total nationwide abortion ban ― and he’s still a cosponsor of this bill.

Perry has backed the Life at Conception Act in every Congress since 2017. This bill guarantees a constitutional “right to life” to every “human being,” and defines “human being” to include “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”

In effect, this legislation