The media covers debates on bioethical issues with worrying frequency, such as those surrounding abortion, euthanasia, research and experimentation on human embryos, etc. These are matters of great importance and are fundamentally relevant to people's lives, as they affect how we approach issues such as sickness, old age and death, the beginning of life, the respect due to it, freedom and personal autonomy, citizens' rights and responsibilities, the very identity of the person. If it is always difficult to argue in a rational manner, when the subject is bioethical, debate becomes almost impossible, given the implications these matters have for contenders' lives. We witness, then, bitter disputes approached from different conceptual frameworks which have opposing opinions on what is true, ethical and just.

On the other hand, given the suspicion cast on language by Nietzsche and his deconstructionist followers, mentioning words such as person or human nature, truth, freedom or personal identity is to expose oneself to accusations of naivety. We live in an intellectual climate that MacIntyre called 'emotivist', in which all evaluative judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, feeling, and non-rational attitudes.

If one has decided that truth and reality are discursive constructions, that discourses don't discover but rather create reality, then should one want to change a particular social reality, one turns first to convenient ‘linguistic engineering', to coining designer expressions to rename the everyday things. Linguistic engineering starts from the premise that if we change the word, we can change the reality, or at least the social perception of it.

A privileged resource of linguistic engineering is euphemism. The totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century managed to exploit it to the maximum: the Nazi and communist dictatorships executed, even anticipated, the verbal camouflage and manipulation predicted by G. Orwell in his novel ‘1984'.

Certainly not all euphemisms are manipulative. I'm talking about the deceitful euphemism, the masking, the cosmetics at the service of an ideology. This kind of euphemism, by giving a new name to a determined reality, proposes a new vision of the reality, in accordance with the ideology that coined the name. But the reality remains intact. Hence the need to look for alternatives when usage has ended up ‘contaminating' the euphemistic expression. This is the ‘domino effect'.

The main product of manipulative euphemism is the expression ‘voluntary interruption of pregnancy' to refer to ‘induced abortion', a term that has been imposed in official discourse with the controversial organic law on sexual and reproductive health and voluntary interruption of pregnancy, and has had the honor of entering in the Royal Academy of Medicine's Dictionary of Medical Terms, and even in the official academic Dictionary. In both dictionaries abortion is defined as "interruption of pregnancy". But not all dictionaries define it in the same way. The Current Spanish Dictionary (Manuel Seco, O. Andrés and G. Ramos) and the Dictionary of Mexican Spanish – to give an example from either side of the Atlantic – disagree with the official definition. For the former, abortion is the "voluntary or induced expulsion of the fetus". ‘To abort' in the latter is "the expulsion of the fetus before it can survive or when it is already dead".

It could be argued that ‘to interrupt' also means "to cancel, to prevent the continuity of something". And here, again, there is a discrepancy between the official dictionary and nonacademic dictionaries, which specify that the meaning of ‘interrupt' is formed partly by the semantic feature "for some time and space". For this reason, the notion of ‘interrupt' cannot be applied to abortion: in abortion, pregnancy is not ‘interrupted'. It is definitively canceled.

One also comes across euphemistic substitutes for ‘euthanasia' in expressions like ‘dignified death' and 'assisted dying', phrases copied from English. The same resource is evident in creations such as ‘assisted fertilization' for 'artificial fertilization', ‘human reproduction' instead of ‘conception' or ‘procreation'. The coinage of the term ‘pre-embryo', which has, fortunately, been abandoned by scientists, as shown by Gonzalo Herranz in his book El embrión ‘ficticio' (2013, The "fictitious" embryo), has justified questionable ethical practices. The linguistic adventures of the word ‘gender' deserve a study apart, forced as it has been to refer to something other than what everyday language would have it mean.

The simple fact that there is so much euphemism at so many key points of current bioethical debate makes you think. I hope that we don't have cause to regret, as so many Western intellectuals in the last century did, accommodating a mentality that wants to change the common words and impose a language of politically correct design.