Pierre, SD (LifeNews.com) -- Former abortion practitioner Bernard Nathanson has put his name behind the second effort to ban abortions in South Dakota. Voters in the state will consider an effort to prohibit most abortions, except those in cases of rape, incest or saving the mother's life.

The first ban failed during the 2006 elections because it featured only the life of the mother exception. Polls showed South Dakota voters would favor a measure if it included the exceptions for sexual abuse cases.

The VoteYesforLife group that is behind the ban has released a new television commercial featuring the former abortion practitioner, who became a leading pro-life figure with the release of his seminal video Silent Scream.

Nathanson, a medical doctor, calls on South Dakota voters to ban the use of “abortion as birth control" by supporting Initiated Measure 11.

Nathanson explains that he and his colleagues who founded NARAL created it to “export our pro-abortion mentality across the land.”

“One of our strategies was to deny what we knew to be true, that an abortion destroys the life of an existing human being," he says in the commercial. “This was the greatest mistake of my life… and the greatest mistake in our nation’s history."

Nathanson ran one of the biggest abortion businesses in the nation and did about 75,000 abortions during his career, before exposure to videos of ultrasounds on unborn children changed his mind about the humanity of the baby before birth.

The video features leaders of top pro-abortion groups like NARAL, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU speaking out against the abortion ban.

Nathanson made headlines when he admitted that NARAL made up the number of deaths of women from illegal abortions to allow for Roe v. Wade to make abortions legal throughout pregnancy.

"We spoke of 5,000 - 10,000 deaths a year," he said. "I confess that I knew the figures were totally false [but] it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"

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