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 thing a 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 as the 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 would outlaw virtually all abortion. It makes no exceptions for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest. It makes no exceptions for embryos created through IVF, either.

Here is Perry’s name officially listed as a sponsor of this bill in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023. His name has an asterisk next to it to denote that he is an original sponsor of this bill, meaning he signed onto it as a supporter as soon as it was introduced.

Requests for comment from Perry’s campaign and from his congressional office were not returned.

The Republican lawmaker ran uncontested in his primary election on Tuesday. He’ll face Democrat Janelle Stelson, a former local news anchor, in November. Stelson is a former Republican and running as a centrist.

Perry has held this House seat for six terms, but at least one national political analyst has downgraded the GOP’s chances of keeping it in November, shifting this seat from “likely Republican” to “leans Republican.”

Trump won this congressional district by four points in the 2020 presidential election.