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ROME -- Emma Bonino, who rose to political prominence in the 1970s as a leader of the Radical Party campaign to legalize abortion in heavily Roman Catholic Italy over 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 with pasturing 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.