Why does abortion make people crazy?

The recent laws passed in Kansas and Texas to try to prevent people from having abortions bother me deeply.  They seem to have skipped all the reasonable approaches to try to reduce abortions and just jumped to the extremes.

In Texas (and a few other states) they are mandating extreme and often embarrassing medical procedures before you can get an abortion.  Many of these procedures involve sticking large rods into the woman's vagina and are known to be uncomfortable in some cases.  I know that pro-life people are often willing to go to almost any extreme to prevent abortions (which they consider murder) but this is not the methods that we use in this country to mold peoples behavior.  Imagine if the government wanted to improve the gas mileage of vehicles on the road and they forced everyone who wanted to buy a truck to go through some kind of anal probing.  This would seem like a ridiculous solution to almost all American but for some reason, anything goes when abortions are involved.

We as a country almost always start with something much more benign like taxing the undesirable behavior.  This is the primary way we have addressed smoking in this country.  In the 60s and early 70s the per capita cigarette consumption in the US was over 4000 cigarettes a year.  In 2006 it was only 1600.  So by using taxes (and information concerning the dangers of smoking) we have reduced the average cigarette usage to one third of what it was 50 years ago.  So why don't states start with something much easier for the general public to swallow like taxes when we deal with abortion?

Sadly, the laws passed in Kansas have been even worse than the laws passed in Texas.  In Kansas, it is now legal for your doctor to lie to you to try to prevent you from getting an abortion.  This is going to seriously damage the doctor-patient relationship over time and cause some people to not take their doctor's advice because they are no longer trustworthy.  So this "pro-life" stance is going to result in people not getting the care they should get and likely result in more preventable deaths.  We have enough problems with healthcare in this country that we don't need to manufacture more.

Ironically there are 2 methods to help prevent unwanted pregnancies (and therefor abortions) that pro-life conservatives seem to oppose rather than embrace.

1) comprehensive sex education  (There are multiple research studies that show teenagers start having sex at a later age if they have comprehensive sex education rather than abstinence-only or no sex education.)
2) wide spread use and easy access to birth control  (what better way to prevent unwanted pregnancies?  It would also be useful if we had some form of contraceptive pills for men since men seem less likely to want children at younger ages than women.)

I firmly believe that if we as a country focused on better sex education, easier access to contraceptives and taxed abortions as undesirable that we could reduce the abortion rate by 80+% over the next 40 years.  Once abortions become rare, it would be easier to make them illegal because people would see them as less useful and necessary.

It would also help that after taking such a reasonable approach to reducing abortions that the pro-life movement would no longer be seen as crazy by many of the people in this country because right now the pro-life movement is scaring off all the moderates in this country with their actions.  It is hard to win a war of ideas when you scare away the potential new recruits.

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