Emma Bonino, face of Italy's divorce and abortion reforms, dies at 78
Italian politician and human rights campaigner Emma Bonino, who became a leading face of the campaigns that legalised divorce and abortion in Italy in the 1970s despite objections from the Vatican, has died at the age of 78. Her party, +Europa, announced her death.
Bonino remained a prominent public figure in Italy for more than five decades, even after the Radical Party lost its earlier political prominence. She served in national governments, held a senior role in the European Commission, co-founded the anti-death penalty group Hands Off Cain, and was widely known to younger audiences as a sharp television commentator. Her 1999 bid to become Italy's first woman president was unsuccessful.
In announcing her death, +Europa said: "Her life was a long struggle against everything that denies freedom: against clandestine abortion, world hunger, the stranglehold of party politics, female genital mutilation, punitive justice, genocide, and every form of authoritarianism." Bonino was born on March 9, 1948, in Bra, near Turin, and spent her childhood on a farm. In a 2023 television interview, she described that life as "deadly boring".
She entered politics because she wanted to change the law. At 26, she became pregnant and had an abortion when it was still illegal in Italy. Calling it one of the most humiliating experiences of her life, she went on to help found the Information Centre for Sterilization and Abortion in 1975, which provided information and performed abortions before they were legalised. The following year, she was elected to parliament for the Radical Party, which stood for anticlericalism, civil liberties, feminism and liberalism, and positioned itself against what it saw as a corrupt and conservative political system and the Catholic Church's wide influence on Italian society. Abortion was legalised in 1978, and Bonino went on to become one of the party's most active leaders.
Over a 50-year political career, Bonino was elected six times to the Lower House and twice to the Senate. In 2017, she became the leader of +Europa, the liberal and European federalist party slate she launched before the 2018 general election. She also served as foreign minister, trade minister and minister for EU affairs in centre-left governments in the 2000s and 2010s, and was one of the strongest advocates of a common European foreign and defence policy.
Bonino gained wider European prominence in 1995, when then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi offered her one of Italy's two seats in the European Commission. As commissioner, she helped shape the EU's consumer protection policy and created the European Commission Humanitarian Office, now the bloc's main humanitarian arm. Humanitarian affairs remained especially close to her, and she travelled to conflict zones including the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan, arguing that humanitarian aid could not be used as an excuse to avoid political or military action. In the 1999 European elections, she led the Lista Bonino slate, which won 8.5 per cent of the vote and became Italy's fourth political force.
At the end of 2001, she began spending half her time in Cairo as she became involved in Arab women's fight for equality. A graduate in foreign languages from Milan's Bocconi University, she became fluent in Arabic and built a network of intellectuals, politicians and civil society figures. Never married, she remained close to her family in Piedmont. In a 2020 Vanity Fair interview, she said: "My father died before I could show him I could accomplish something. He never understood my restlessness. He used to tell me: Emma, you are like Japanese poetry: beautiful, but I can't understand it."
In January 2015, Bonino said on Radio Radicale that she had lung cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy, but did not intend to stop her political work. In May that year, she said the cancer was in complete remission, and eight years later she appeared on a popular television interview programme saying she was healed. After her diagnosis, she often appeared in public wearing colourful headscarves. In later years, she also developed a close friendship with Pope Francis despite their differences over issues including abortion and euthanasia. In November 2024, Francis visited her at home shortly after she had been discharged from hospital following treatment for respiratory problems, bringing roses and chocolates. Bonino said that in their conversations, Francis always urged her to continue her humanitarian battles and defend those most in need.
In May 2025, when her hometown of Bra granted her honorary citizenship, Bonino said: "My passion is humanity. I've got roots, I've got a homeland, a family, but precisely all that allows me to be a citizen of the world." When asked what battles she still had to fight, she would reply: "Many, too many. Human rights, world hunger, free scientific research ... Ten lives won't be enough." Bonino is survived by her siblings, Domenica and Giovanni, and their children, closing the life of a politician and activist whose work ranged from civil liberties in Italy to humanitarian causes abroad.
