Emma Bonino, Italian politician who fought for abortion rights, dies aged 78

Emma Bonino’s life in politics began with a crime. In 1974, at a time when abortion was illegal in Italy, ⁠she travelled to a clandestine clinic in Florence ⁠to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.

“Coming back by train at night, I ⁠decided that never, never, never again should anyone have to suffer this humiliation,” she later recalled. A year later, determined to drag abortion out of the shadows, she handed herself in to police, turning her private “offence” into a public act of defiance.

The arrest made headlines, fuelling a campaign that eventually led to the legalisation of abortion in 1978. It also launched Bonino into parliament with the Radical Party, a small but relentless force for civil rights.

Direct and diminutive, ‌Bonino was a passionate advocate for social justice and gender equality who deliberately courted controversy to advance her many causes at home and abroad.

“I have been fighting for rights all my life, warning people to defend them, because they don’t last forever,” she told state broadcaster Rai in 2024.

Italy’s former foreign minister Emma Bonino speaks at the Trust Women conference in London in November 2014. Photo: ReutersIn a dynamic career spanning five decades, Bonino won repeated election to both the Italian and European parliaments and served as a foreign minister and European affairs minister in Rome. She was also a high-profile European Commissioner in Brussels.