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"Endorse" might be the wrong word. If people are going to do what they're definately going to do, infanticide would be a more honest, legible way of doing it, and would incur no additional moral debt.
As to age limits, the point is that whether it's a child or not is the Mother's decision. Again, I point to the ancient Greek custom, which is where we appear to have arrived: the coexistence of legal abortion till birth (and in some cases, infanticide laws no one seems interested in enforcing) with laws that add serious extra penalties to harm caused to the unborn by third-parties might be considered schizophrenic, but in fact it makes perfect sense if one presumes that the personhood of the child is in fact determined by the mother. I mean, every possible objection to this that I can see is what we already have, so why would I object to simply being honest about it? And if we're willing to kill them when they're completely innocent, why not be willing to kill them when they grow into assholes like the rest of us?
Bonus points for restoring exposure as the method of killing, so someone else can actually come and rescue the kid and raise them as their own, which tends to drag in the point that abortion is actually a whole lot more about closure than most pro-choice people are willing to admit.
The point of the world being full of evils is a reminder, to myself as much as anyone, that none of this actually solves anything long-term. Forcing people to not kill their babies will not actually make the people on either side of that interaction less evil. When talking about morals-driven policy, it's easy to lose sight of that fact.
I don't know that laws have ever had as their primary purpose moral improvement. Sure, lawmakers might talk about how banning evil things will improve society, but mostly we make things illegal to deter people from doing them. I remain unsure how serious you are being. Presumably if you believe abortion is evil, then banning abortion would reduce the number of abortions. It would not instantly convince all the pro-abortion people that abortion is evil, so in that sense sure, they won't become "less evil," but if abortion decreases over time (and usually, thought not always, illegal things also become less socially acceptable), isn't that a moral "win" for society, from a pro-life point of view?
One probably shouldn't rely on them to do so, but I think some people, especially Christian Conservatives on the one side and the more radical Progressives on the other, think that society as a whole can get more or less moral in appreciable ways and without practical limit. They think there's some sort of Utopia available if only the system is adjusted just so.
In the case of Abortion, from a Christian perspective the problem isn't that people commit abortions, it's that they want to. Stopping them doesn't stop the sin, only its immediate effects. Likewise, stopping people from committing particular sins in particular times and places doesn't make your own preferred sins any less sinful. Stopping the immediate effects might still be preferable from a practical perspective, and it might help forestall a slide into worse norms, but from a moral perspective people on both ends of the action are still sinners regardless.
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Ever?
Various historical theocracies would surely disagree with you. Kosher law. Sharia. Puritan colonies. More modern missions, sects, and cults.
There’s also the whole edifice of Chinese political science. I’m quite rusty and don’t remember what distinguishes Confucianism and Legalism. But there was a nice post recently about “rectification of names.” Look at some of the quotes:
This is in the context of defending state-sponsored music. Xunzi clearly believed in the power of state action to align people with morality. I don’t think that’s unusual for any era.
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