Emma Bonino, Italian Abortion Rights Pioneer and Former Foreign Minister, Dies at 78
Emma Bonino, the veteran Italian politician and longtime human rights campaigner who played a major role in the fight to legalize abortion in Italy, has died at the age of 78. Bonino died Friday, Sept. 11, 2026, her party, +Europa, confirmed.
She had been hospitalized on Sunday, Sept. 6, after a respiratory crisis and arrived at Santo Spirito hospital in Rome in serious condition. She was moved out of intensive care on Thursday, Sept. 10, and transferred to a private clinic before her death the following day.
No official cause of death has been released by her family or representatives; Reuters, citing sources close to the family, reported only the hospitalization timeline. Her death brings an end to a political career spanning five decades, during which she became one of Italy’s most recognizable voices on civil liberties, women’s rights, humanitarian issues and European integration.
Emma Bonino Past Health Issues
Bonino had a long history of respiratory illness that makes the final hospitalization difficult to view in isolation, even without a confirmed cause. She was hospitalized for respiratory problems in the autumn of 2024, and in November 2025 she suffered another episode serious enough to require intensive care. Those episodes sit alongside her 2015 lung cancer diagnosis, which she said she had overcome by 2023.
Emma Bonino’s Fight for Abortion Rights
Bonino’s national profile in Italy was built on abortion activism at a time when the procedure was illegal and carried criminal penalties. In 1975, she helped found the Information Centre on Sterilisation and Abortion, known as CISA, which provided abortions outside the law, and she turned herself in to authorities over her own abortion to force the issue into public view. That act of self-exposure was deliberate: rather than campaign from a distance, she made her own body and her own legal exposure part of the political argument for changing the law.
The strategy worked in combination with a broader push from the Radical Party and allied activists, and Italy legalized abortion in 1978. Abortion was the issue that made her a national figure, but it was never the only cause she attached herself to. She went on to campaign for divorce rights, against the death penalty, and on migration, humanitarian aid and European integration, often using the same confrontational tactics – hunger strikes, referendum campaigns, civil disobedience – that had defined her abortion activism. That willingness to break with convention put her at odds not just with the Catholic Church but frequently with her own allies in Italian politics. It is also what carried her from street-level activism into some of the most senior offices in Italian and European government.
A Five-Decade Political Career
Bonino entered Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in 1976 with the Radical Party, a year after founding CISA, giving her a legislative platform to keep pressing the causes she had built her name on. She later moved into European institutions, serving as a member of the European Parliament before she was appointed European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid in 1995, a post she held until 1999 alongside responsibilities covering consumer protection and fisheries. In that role she managed the EU’s emergency aid program and traveled personally into conflict zones including the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Afghanistan, arguing that humanitarian aid could not substitute for political engagement. She returned to the Italian government in the 2000s, serving as minister for European affairs and trade before she was appointed foreign minister in 2013 under Prime Minister Enrico Letta.
In 2017, she helped establish +Europa, a political movement built around liberal values and closer European integration; the party never became a major electoral force, but Bonino remained one of its most visible figures and a senator until 2022. Her continued relevance well into her seventies came less from party success and more from the personal standing she had built across five decades of taking positions that put her outside the political mainstream.
In November 2024, Pope Francis made a home visit to Bonino shortly after she had been released from hospital following a health scare, a gesture that stood out because the two had disagreed sharply on issues including abortion and euthanasia for most of their public lives.
