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.