Emma Bonino, leader of abortion and divorce battles that changed Italy, dies at 78

ROME — Emma Bonino, who rose to political prominence as a leader of campaigns by the Radical Party that legalized abortion and divorce in the 1970s in heavily Roman Catholic Italy against the objections of the Vatican, has died.She was 78.Her party of recent years, +Europa, announced her death.“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,” the party said.Italy’s conservative prime minister Giorgia Meloni paid tribute to Bonino, saying their different backgrounds and perspectives “never prevented me from acknowledging her significance and her role in our nation’s public life.”“For decades, Emma Bonino has been a strong and recognizable voice in Italian politics, championing her ideas with determination,” Meloni wrote on social media.Even after the Radicals’ political star faded, Bonino remained a key political figure and human rights campaigner active in Italy for over five decades.

She served as a European commissioner for then-Premier Silvio Berlusconi and was a co-founder of the death penalty watchdog Hands Off Cain.But her bid in 1999 to become Italy’s first female president failed.Bonino in Rome in 1993.Livio Anticoli / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images fileShe remained known to younger generations as a sought-after political pundit, appearing frequently on Italian TV with her sharp wit and cutting insights.

After her cancer diagnosis in 2015, she invariably appeared in public wearing colorful headscarves.Bonino’s passing follows the recent death of several other feminist heroes, including activist Gloria Steinem and poet Robin Morgan.Challenging the VaticanBorn on March 9, 1948, in Bra — not far from the northwestern Italian city of Turin, where carmaker Fiat’s factory drove the economy — she spent her childhood on a farm, where she was often ...