[hnbad]

It's worth reading a bit into disability rights theory IMO.

Many so-called disabilities only become disabilities when individuals are confronted with a lack of affordances. This isn't just about wheelchair ramps, even "able-bodied" people can be situationally disabled if the affordances they take for granted are taken away (a sighted person might be more "disabled" in a dark room than a blind person who knows how to solve problems without relying on sight).

Autism is used to describe a vast swathe of "conditions" so it's hard to generalize but most autistics don't "feel" disabled except when interfacing with allistics (non-autistics). There are also studies indicating that allistics tend to react negatively (or even hostile) to autistics by default when the opposite is not true (nor between autistics).

Organizations like Autism Speaks tend to pathologize autism as an "insufficiency" by focusing on how allistics tend to perceive "people with severe autism", e.g. mutism, "stereotypic behaviors", etc. But that's a very biased view even of the small subset of autistics it attempts to highlight. For example I find it hard to argue that "parallel play" is inferior to "cooperative play" except that autistics tend to enjoy whereas allistics tend to prefer the latter; or that "special interests" (say, trains) are a matter of concern while obsessing with socially accepted hobbies (like historic football matches) are somehow not.

All that said, my country has banned a lot of early stage screening due to ethical concerns and while screenings for trisomy 21 aren't illegal (despite having very unreliable results btw) they're socially frowned upon by many people and rarely result in abortions. So yes, in my cultural context the general consensus seems to be that that could be considered a form of eugenics.