Emma Bonino, Italy's Abortion Crusader, Dies at 78

Bonino is born in Bra, in northwestern Italy near Turin, and spends her childhood on a farm pasturing pigs — a life she later called "deadly boring" in a 2023 television interview.

At 26 and pregnant, she travels to a clandestine clinic in Florence to end the pregnancy at a time when abortion was illegal in Italy, per Reuters. She later described it as one of the most humiliating experiences of her life.

She is among the founders of the Information Center for Sterilization and Abortion, which provided information and performed abortions before they were legal.

She is elected to the Italian parliament for the Radical Party, an anticlerical, civil-libertarian outfit that positioned itself against both the political establishment and the Catholic Church's influence over Italian life.

Abortion is legalized in Italy, over the Vatican's objections.

Center-right Premier Silvio Berlusconi hands her one of Italy's two seats on the European Commission. As commissioner she builds the EU's consumer protection policy and creates the European Commission Humanitarian Office, now Europe's main humanitarian arm, and travels to war zones in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan.

Her own slate, Lista Bonino, takes 8.5% in the European elections and becomes Italy's fourth-largest political force. Her bid that year to become Italy's first female president fails.

She takes up the cause of Arab women's equality and begins spending half her time in Cairo, becoming fluent in Arabic.

She serves as foreign minister, trade minister and EU affairs minister in Italian center-left governments.

She announces on Radio Radicale that she has lung cancer and is on chemotherapy, but will not stop working. By May she says the cancer is in complete remission; eight years later she tells a TV program she is healed.

She founds and leads +Europa, a liberal, European federalist slate, ahead of the 2018 general election.

Pope Francis, with whom she kept up a friendship despite clashing on abortion and euthanasia, visits her home with roses and chocolates after her release from the hospital for respiratory problems.

+Europa announces her death at 78.