I actually had a discussion post taken down at another site for exactly that issue.
Someone asked if parents would terminate a child if there was a genetic test for homosexuality and/or transgenderism, and whether or not it could be prohibited.
I brought up that you can terminate a child for any reasons at any time. You can end a pregnancy because you don’t want a kid right now because of the hassle. And there is no limit on terminating pregnancies because the child is imperfect. The Asian community in Canada and North America are engaging in a modest level of sex selected abortion based on data. A feminist received Twitter backlash for terminating a healthy boy, because she hates men.
If you can kill a kid because you don’t want that gender, if you can kill the kid because it is inconvenient, you can certainly kill it because it is abnormal or diagnosed prenatally as mentally ill.
(That’s probably the part that got my answer deleted and the warning on my account - describing homosexuality as abnormal and transgenderism as a mental illness.)
My firstborn had clubbed feet, now fully corrected, but we ended up with a surgery and a year of casting. There are people who terminate pregnancies for that and hare lip.
I brought up that if you can end the pregnancy for any reason, then ending it because the child is imperfect is considered even more moral. And a child who probably won’t have children and can’t live a normal life is even more justifiable.
I was also flamed for bringing up the fact that liberals have already failed on that point - an estimated 100 million girls have been aborted or just killed after birth for being girls - so don’t argue civil rights when feminists gave their side a pass for two generations.
But they honestly, seriously tried to argue an exception like this in their favor - that you can kill a kid just because it is inconvenient, but not if it is a protected minority.
To be logically consistent, you CANNOT argue that someone can kill a child because it has clubbed feet but not if it has Down’s Syndrome.
That’s why I, as a prolifer who actually had a kid with a birth defect, think this law is indefensible. You can’t have carveouts like this. It isn’t logical and isn’t fair.
You can argue for no abortion or limiting it to the first trimester. You can’t argue “any one any time but not the group I think is beyond criticism”.
What you are saying is of course right, but I think the purpose of this law is “to drill some holes into the precedent”. In other words, Chief Justice Roberts is known to respect precedents and is unlikely to vote to overrule Roe v. Wade right away, but he may accept this restriction on abortion. Such a ruling would weaken Roe v. Wade as a precedent. More and more restrictions on abortion would be upheld. Finally, Roe v. Wade would become irrelevant even if it weren’t explicitly overruled.
You’re quite right about the arbitrariness of such a law. Also, what’s to stop any woman from saying that she is afraid for her own health as the official excuse for terminating a Down’s Syndrome pregnancy? As long as she sticks to her story, who is ever to know the real reason for the abortion?