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I think you’re totally misunderstanding the motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion.
Eugenics requires perceiving oneself and one’s progeny as part of a larger biological project - as merely one tiny branch of the human genetic/ancestral tree, the long-term health of which requires careful and intentional cultivation. Eugenics is a fundamentally communitarian endeavor. It’s about wanting humanity as a whole to be improved, using individual instantiations of eugenic breeding/sorting to direct the overall genetic health of the population in the direction of iterated improvement.
A middle-class American progressive woman who aborts a fetus with Down Syndrome is not thinking like this at all. Her decision could be framed in two ways: one is as a purely selfish decision - “If I have to raise a massively burdensome and defective child for the rest of my life, it will be financially catastrophic, require massive amounts of resources and effort, and will substantially decrease my quality of life.”; the other is to see it as an act of mercy for that child - “It would be better not to be born at all, than to be born as an incurably defective and mentally/physically retarded person, incapable of independence and entirely dependent on the indulgence of others for my entire life.”
Neither of these require, or in fact in any way involve, any orientation toward how your decision to abort a child ties into the larger genetic health of other future humans. Many of these women are some of the smartest and most capable individuals in our society; if they were primarily motivated by eugenic thinking, why on earth would they be deciding against perpetuating their superior genetic stock just because “it’s not the right time for me personally”? Abortion is clearly the dysgenic course of action in that case, barring fetal abnormalities.
The motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion was not the point, there. The point was that progressives do not oppose eugenics per se; practices of a eugenic character are in no need of special particular motivational states in order to be eugenic practices.
So, yes, if we're talking on a personal level about individual motivations, the science of "improving stock" (as Galton put it) is something individuals are not necessarily thinking about when they make decisions of a eugenic nature. But this was a discussion about policy, and I was responding to someone else who suggested that progressives oppose eugenics, which is simply not true. Progressives are fine with a wide array of eugenic practices, so long as people don't talk about the eugenic character of those practices (especially, while using the word "eugenics").
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This still qualifies as eugenics. Eugenics doesn't have to be about "humanity as a whole". You can think about eugenics on the level of a single person.
But how is this eugenics specifically? Yes, Down Syndrome in particular is a genetic condition, but what about aborting a fetus with any other sort of detectable congenital condition, i.e. hydrocephaly, missing limbs, etc.? I think that these are all motivated fundamentally on a recognition that some people’s lives are doomed from the very start to be unpleasant, short, or burdensome, and that if one had the ability to spare such people a life of suffering and extreme adversity, it is morally correct, or at least permissible, to do so. I think it’s coming from a totally different perspective than progressive eugenics proper.
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