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Originally Posted by You Are Gay
I would doubt a newborn child has significantly more sentienence than an embryo. A child's brain is still developing for years after birth. A child is just potential when it's born the same as an embryo so what's the difference?
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An embryo can't be easily sustained without being permanently linked to a woman.
In practical terms, this
is about a woman's right to choose. The problem with rights for embryos is that you'd be diminishing the right of women to control their own bodies. And quite frankly, you can't actually stop abortions even if the medical profession don't carry them out.
Babies that have severe health problems upon being born have an obviously increased chance of dying anyway - 1 in 90 (ish) live births have some sort congentinal defect but close to 1 in 10 still births had a similar problem. But generally, you don't need to talk about society (or more specifically, doctors) "killing" disabled people, they'd just need to withdraw medical care.
With health problems that pose a low risk of very early death (like downs syndrome), I'm not sure how many of those are either obvious in all cases or fully grasped by their parents. Babies can do very little for themselves regardless of impairment and so the full extent of their adult disability won't be obvious (to the parents, at least). And by the time you've cared for a child for quite a while then killing it is might be a rather difficult step to take.
As for society (as Nod says, it's not clear what you mean by this but let's assume social workers+the medical profession) intervening and killing the child directly...why bother? Of the 2-3 million people getting disability living allowance in the UK only something like 5-10% of claimants have had the condition since birth. If we're interested in austerity then legalising euthanasia would probably save more money than shooting all those mooching down syndrome kids.