Our current practical possibilities for many severe genetical defects (many of them less common but much harsher than Down's - say, an expected lifespan measured in weeks) in essence is a choice of (a) suffer or (b) early prenatal detection followed by abortion. Unlike my earlier example (if a cure existed), this is not a nice choice to make, it's rather horrible; but I've had both the opportunity and need to think about it seriously and I wouldn't (couldn't) judge anyone who chose (b) in such situation, although it can be labeled as eugenics.

Thus, I have a deep dislike for reasoning such as "X leads to eugenics, ergo X is bad". Eugenics is a loaded, biased label. Any decision should be judged as okay or evil on its own; and if okay decisions lead to the label eugenics, then it doesn't make them less okay in any way and shouldn't affect the evaluation of that decision.

However, the word 'torture' and denying senses comes from me earlier reading about (hopefully rare) incidents of deaf parents intentionally choosing (via selective artificial insemination) to have kids that will be permanently deaf as well. I don't agree with that and consider it equal to, say, those parents cutting the ears of their infant after birth.

And from that comes the reverse argument - if the procedures become cheap, easy and safe, then in practice 'not-fixing' a damaged gene is almost the same as intentionally damaging a gene; since you could easily have had both options; chose the damaged one; and forced that choice and consequences on the kid. The main difference is choice of action vs choice of non-action, which are psychologically perceived differently; the Trolley problem is the classic example.