The Guardian's Bonino Obituary, and the Island That Voted Against Divorce

The Guardian published an obituary of Emma Bonino on Tuesday, describing the Italian politician and feminist as a Radical party activist who fought a long campaign for women's rights, and who died at 78. The obituary opens in 1974, when Bonino — told by a doctor she was sterile — became pregnant and attempted to obtain an abortion in Italy, where the procedure was then illegal. That year Italians also voted in the referendum that kept the divorce law on the statute book, a contest Carlo Casalegno's paper and the Christian Democrats had framed as a defence of the family.

The Local Italy reported the same day that Italy's political world turned out on Tuesday for Bonino's state funeral, describing her as a former government minister, a European commissioner and a feminist fighter. Between those two accounts lies the shape of a career: the Radicals' campaigns, the 1978 abortion law, and the long argument inside a Catholic country about who decides.

Sardinia's own record in that argument is worth setting down plainly, because the foreign press rarely reports it. In the 1974 divorce referendum the island returned one of the highest shares of 'no' votes in the country, and the deepest 'no' majorities came from the interior — the pastoral and agricultural communes of the centre, where the parish was often the only institution left. The island's electoral geography has not moved as far or as fast as its coastal cities.

That is the distance the Guardian's obituary measures. Bonino's early activism belonged to a period when abortion in Italy was prosecuted under the criminal code, and when the Radicals used referendum campaigns and civil disobedience to force the issue into law. The 1978 law that followed permitted abortion in the first ninety days and allowed conscientious objection by doctors — an exemption whose effect has been unevenly distributed across the country, and which has left wide regional gaps in provision. Foreign coverage of Italy's health system returns to that gap periodically; it is one of the few Italian domestic arguments that travels.

Whether Sardinia's interior still carries the weight of 1974 is not something the cited wire coverage establishes, and it should not be asserted. What the foreign press does report, and has for years, is the island's demographic contraction: a population of roughly 1.58 million, an ageing profile, and an interior that keeps emptying toward Cagliari and the coasts. A controversy about access to services in a depopulating interior is not the same as a controversy about conscience, but the two meet in the same small towns, where a hospital ward closes before a parish does.

The state funeral itself is a matter of record in the international coverage rather than of interpretation. The Local Italy reported that political figures from across the parties attended, and that tributes had been arriving since the weekend. The Guardian's obituary notes her later career in government and at the European Commission, and her continued association with the Radicals' civil-liberties agenda.

For an island that reads mainland politics at a remove, the useful part of the obituary is the part about method. Bonino's causes were advanced through referendum petitions, hunger strikes and European institutions — instruments that do not require a parliamentary majority to begin, and that have historically suited regions with small delegations in Rome. Sardinia has used the same instruments, from the autonomy statute to the recent fights over energy installations and military ranges. The obituary is a reminder that they were not invented on the mainland.