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

ROME (AP) — 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 Premier 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.

She 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.

Born 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 tasked to pasture pigs, a lifestyle she described as “deadly boring” in a 2023 TV interview.

Bonino first got involved in Italian politics because she wanted to change the law. At 26, she became pregnant and had an abortion, even though it was illegal at that time.

Recalling the experience as one of the most humiliating of her life, in 1975 she was among the founders of the Information Center for Sterilization and Abortion, an organization that provided information and performed abortions before they were legalized.

The following year she was elected to the Italian parliament for the maverick Radical Party, a bastion of anticlericalism, civil libertarianism, feminism, liberalism and radicalism in Italy.

The party proposed itself as the strongest opposition to the Italian political establishment, seen as corrupt and conservative, and to the Catholic Church’s extensive influence on Italian society.

In 1978 abortion was legalized. That particular campaign may have been over, but Bonino had found her vocation: Politics was her life, and she became one of the most active leaders of the Radical Party and its successors.

A veteran legislator in Italian politics and an activist for various reform policies, she was elected six times as a Lower House lawmaker and two times as a senator. In 2017, she became the leader of +Europa, a liberal, European federalist party slate she launched ahead of the 2018 Italian general election.

An explosive presence in politics during her 50-year-long career, Bonino was one of the few Italian political figures who scored important achievements both at home and internationally.

Bonino won European exposure in a role she owed to then center-right Premier Berlusconi who, in 1995, offered her one of Italy’s two seats in the European Commission.

As a Commissioner she forged the EU’s consumer protection policy and created the European Commission Humanitarian Office, which is now the primary European humanitarian arm. It was this last portfolio, the humanitarian affairs, that she felt most strongly about.

She traveled to war zones — former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan — and convinced Europe that humanitarian assistance couldn’t be an excuse for lack of political or military intervention.

In June 1999 she headed a slate named after her — Lista Bonino — at the European elections. It was an overwhelming success: The party got 8.5% of the votes and became Italy’s fourth political force.

Bonino served as foreign minister, trade minister and EU affairs minister in Italian center-left governments of the 2000s and 2010s.

She was one of the strongest advocates for a common European foreign and defense policy. “My passion is humanity,” she said in May 2025, when her hometown Bra granted her honorary citizenship. “I’ve got roots, I’ve got a homeland, a family, but precisely all that allows me to be a citizen of the world.”

She got involved with Arab women’s battle for equality in 2001 and started spending half her time in Cairo. She became fluent in Arabic — she had graduated in foreign languages at Milan’s Bocconi University — and built a network of intellectuals, politicians and prominent civil society figures.

Never married, she maintained strong bonds with her family in Piedmont. “My father died before I could show him I could accomplish something,” she recalled in a 2020 interview with Vanity Fair. “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, she announced on Radio Radicale that she was suffering from lung cancer and was being treated with chemotherapy but didn’t plan to stop her political activity. In May of the same year, she said her cancer was in complete remission and eight years later appeared on a popular TV interview program announcing she was healed.

Over the years, Bonino cultivated a deep friendship with the late Pope Francis, despite their conflicting views on key ethical issues, including abortion and euthanasia.

In November 2024, Francis paid a home visit to Bonino — who had been just released from the hospital after treatment for respiratory problems — bringing her a bouquet of roses and chocolates.

A photo posted by Bonino on social media showed them both sitting in wheelchairs on her sun-drenched terrace in Rome.

Bonino said that during their conversations Francis always encouraged her to bring forward her humanitarian battles, defending those most in need.

When asked what battles she still needed to fight, Bonino used to say: “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.

FILE -Emma Bonino, leader of the ' +Europa ' (More Europe) party, speaks ahead of the March 4 Italian political elections during a press conference at the Foreign Press Club in Rome, Friday, Feb. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis, File)

FILE - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, poses with Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino and Italian Premier Enrico Letta ,on the occasion of their meeting at Chigi Palace government office, in Rome, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, File)

FILE -Italy's Emma Bonino speaks after receiving her honorary doctorate from the University of Brussels during a ceremony at Flagey in Brussels on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2017. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, File)

FILE -Italian politicia Emma Bonino attends the recording of Italian State Television TV show "Vieni via con me" (Come away with me) in Milan, Italy, Monday, Nov. 22, 2010. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno, File)

CAIRO (AP) — Saudi airstrikes hit the rebel-held Mokha airport in Yemen on Friday, an Iranian-backed Houthi broadcaster reported, a day after the Houthis entered the key port city on the Red Sea, bringing them closer to the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

Their advance further threatens commercial shipping on an important alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.

Earlier Friday, Iran’s government called for an end to Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen, throwing its support behind its ally, the Houthis. In its first statement since the rebels entered the port, Iran’s Foreign Ministry also called for a return to negotiations between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis.

The rebels’ capture of Mokha, overlooking tanker routes out of the Red Sea, could boost Iran’s strategy of driving up world oil and gas prices to pressure the United States, experts say. It also raises concerns of a new front opening after more than six months of war in the region – one in which Saudi Arabia is forced to respond.

Experts say the developments in Yemen could give Tehran more leverage in any negotiations with the United States. On Wednesday, the spokesperson for Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard called for any negotiated settlement with the U.S. to include Yemen, the first explicit reference to that front.

The Houthis’ entry into Mokha on Thursday was their biggest territorial gain in years against their Saudi-backed Yemeni opponents. It brought them within 50 miles (80 kilometers) of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, an important alternative for global shipping as Iran targets vessels on the Strait of Hormuz.

The Houthis have already hiked up attacks on Saudi shipping in Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea since declaring a blockade there in July, as well as oil infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia. The Houthis said the move was in response to the kingdom’s blockade of Houthi-held parts of Yemen, in place for years.

Disruption to the waterway could mean trouble for all shipping and for the price of crude oil, which has now soared again. Saudi Arabia has increasingly relied on the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb to export its crude since Iran has been targeting vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. About 12% of the world’s goods are typically shipped through the strait.

Shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb had fallen by about 60% since the Houthis began attacking some ships there in late 2023 while expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Shipping increased this year as Saudi Arabia sought alternatives to the Strait of Hormuz, but renewed Houthi threats have “curtailed” that activity, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

Saudi Arabia, which earlier this week said it had always offered “opportunities for negotiation,” also has said it has the right to defend itself in response to the Houthis’ blockade. The foreign ministers of Iran and Saudi Arabia spoke Thursday about diplomatic efforts to “restore stability” to the region, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on social media.

In a statement released Friday, the National Defense Council of Yemen’s Saudi-backed and internationally recognized government on Thursday strongly condemned the Houthis’ renewed attacks on Saudi Arabia.

The council also acknowledged that Yemen’s government is on the front line of freedom of navigation, and called for international support as the Houthis swept along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb.

The escalating fighting threatens to end a fragile truce that had largely halted Yemen’s civil war since 2022.

At stake are the 40 million people in the Arab world’s poorest country who fear a return to the conflict that killed 150,000 and brought many others to the brink of famine.

The Houthis have been at war with Yemen’s government since 2014, when the rebels swept from their mountainous heartland and seized much of northern and central Yemen. Saudi Arabia entered the war the following year on behalf of the government.

Anna reported from Jerusalem.

Yemen's Houthi rebels ride a motorbike during a mobilization campaign in Sanaa, Yemen, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026. (AP Photo)