Adnkronos (Adnkronos) –
In 1975, Emma Bonino was 27 when she decided to put her body and her freedom at the center of a political battle destined to change Italy. After contributing to the creation of the Information Center on Sterilization and Abortion (CISA), she turned herself in for the crime of procured abortion, choosing civil disobedience to bring to light the reality of clandestine abortion.
Behind that political choice, however, there was a personal experience.
Bonino had experienced a clandestine abortion firsthand and would often recount how the experience had been marked by fear, loneliness, and humiliation. "After going through that abortion and being humiliated, I decided it would never happen to anyone again," she said. A phrase that sums up the origin of her battle: to transform a private experience into a public outcry and ensure that other women would not be forced to experience the same situation.
These were years when abortion was still a crime and thousands of women were forced to resort to clandestine procedures, often risky for their health.
Bonino, along with Adele Faccio, Marco Pannella, and Gianfranco Spadaccia, the most vocal radical group of the time, began providing assistance to women seeking safe abortions. "We began a process of providing public assistance to women in need of abortions, and then self-reporting," Bonino recalled.
The goal was to make public what the law tried to keep hidden: abortion existed, but the ability to have one without putting one's health at risk often depended on economic conditions.
It was precisely this inequality that Bonino emphasized. "Those who had money somehow managed, and those who didn't even risked their health," she explained, recalling those years. Illegal immigration, therefore, did not affect all women equally: those with money could seek out safer doctors and facilities, while poorer women were more exposed to the risks of clandestine abortions.
The decision to self-denounce transformed what could have been a personal matter into a political campaign. In 1975, the CISA case exploded publicly, and the radical activists were arrested. "In reality, we had already publicly assumed responsibility for several months," Bonino recalled, emphasizing that the arrest was part of a civil disobedience strategy: not hiding the action, but openly claiming it to force public opinion and politicians to confront the problem.
Bonino defined that period as "a period of great civil awakening." They were the years of battles for divorce, contraception, conscientious objection, and the extension of civil rights. "Those years were, at least for me, years of profound vitality and commitment," she recalled. And it was precisely women, according to Bonino, that developed a new awareness of the issue of freedom of choice.
The techniques used by the movement were also part of the protest. Bonino said she performed several abortions using a technique then widespread in French feminist movements, similar in principle to aspiration. "We did it out of civil disobedience," she explained. The gesture therefore had a political as well as practical significance: to demonstrate that clandestinity did not eliminate the phenomenon, but only made it more dangerous.
In 1976, Bonino was elected to the Chamber of Deputies on the Radical Party ticket, at just 28 years old. Around the same time, the referendum campaign to decriminalize abortion took shape, supported by the Radicals and L'Espresso, which gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. The mobilization helped bring the issue to the center of national debate. "To avoid this, we called for early elections," Bonino recalled, speaking of the referendum. Then, in 1978, Law 194 was passed, approved on May 22, regulating voluntary termination of pregnancy and ending the criminalization of abortion under the conditions provided for by law.
For Bonino, however, that law was also the result of a political compromise. "The law contained a series of compromises," she observed, recalling how it had been crafted so that even a segment of the Christian Democrats could accept it through abstention or absenteeism. The battle, therefore, did not end with the approval of Law 194. In the following years, Bonino continued to denounce the difficulties in accessing voluntary termination of pregnancy, identifying two main problems: conscientious objection and the difficulty of making medical abortion more widely available.
"Law 194 has many problems, two in particular," she argued. On the one hand, "its non-implementation in certain regions due to a sort of organized conscientious objection"; on the other, according to Bonino, the delay in the use of medical abortion, which was introduced and spread more slowly in Italy than in other European countries.
Yet, looking beyond the critical issues, Bonino has always considered Law 194 a significant achievement. "Despite its limitations, even theoretical ones, the law has worked," she stated, noting how voluntary termination of pregnancy has become a legally recognized option.
Her experience thus represents one of the symbolic moments of the civil rights era of the 1970s: a battle that began with a painful personal experience, transformed into civil disobedience, and finally brought to the institutions. Bonino chose to recount that abortion not as an episode to be hidden, but as the starting point of a collective battle. "I decided it would never happen to anyone again": that sentence encapsulates the essence of a struggle that, from the clandestine nature of the 1970s, reached all the way to Law 194, and which Bonino would continue to consider a question of freedom, health, and self-determination. (by Paolo Martini)
policy
webinfo@adnkronos.com (Web Info)