🎙 What Emma Bonino still forces us to look at
In the episode we have just published, we tell Emma Bonino’s story through three ideas : a law that can be changed, a place that can be claimed in a Parliament that was not designed for you and a memory that does not always reflect merit. We close the episode with a sentence by Roberto Saviano, written on the day of her death : "the right is always the right of those who cannot afford to buy privilege."
That sentence is not only about the past. Here are three ways in which it continues to describe Europe today without having to look very far.
The law Emma Bonino helped win is still not equally accessible
Law 194, passed in 1978 partly thanks to Emma Bonino’s campaign, decriminalized abortion in Italy. It never turned abortion into a fully guaranteed right, it left one door open : conscientious objection, which allows a doctor to refuse to perform an abortion.
According to the Italian Ministry of Health, 60.7% of Italian gynecologists declared themselves conscientious objectors in 2022, a figure that fell to 57.1% in 2023.
But this national average hides a dramatic territorial divide : according to the most recent regional data, the proportion of objectors reaches 91.7% in Molise, 78.6% in Sicily, and 75% in Abruzzo — compared with just 25% in the Aosta Valley.
The 2025 report by the organization Medici del Mondo, presented to the Chamber of Deputies, documents what this means in practice : in regions where access is most difficult, many women are forced to travel to areas where access is easier : a phenomenon the organization calls “healthcare mobility.” A woman who can afford to travel, take a day off work and pay for the journey can exercise her right. A woman who cannot afford those things cannot.
This is precisely the structure Roberto Saviano describes when speaking about Emma Bonino herself in 1975 : a right that exists on paper, but which, in practice, remains reserved for those who can afford it.
A woman in a Parliament of men : it is no longer 1976 but the problem is still not solved
In 1968, women represented only 2.6% of the Italian Parliament and Emma Bonino entered Parliament in 1976 as one of the few female voices in an Assembly designed by and for men.
Fifty years later, the gap has narrowed considerably, without disappearing. In the European Parliament, women accounted for 38.7% of elected members in June 2025 compared with 15.9% in the very first European Parliament elected by direct universal suffrage, in 1979. That is real progress.
But worldwide, the pace is slowing : according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, women held only 27.5% of seats in national parliaments as of January 1, 2026 — an increase of just 0.3 percentage points compared with 2025, the slowest growth recorded in nearly a decade. The organization also notes a decline in the number of women elected as speakers of parliament : only 12 women among 75 new appointments in 2025.
One detail directly echoes Emma Bonino’s history : according to the IPU, parliamentary chambers with a statutory gender-parity mechanism have an average of 31% women, compared with 23% in chambers without one. In other words, women’s representation almost never increases “naturally” — it increases when an explicit rule requires it, just as Law 194 only came into existence because someone fought, openly and directly, to have it written into law.
She may not be the only woman whom European history has failed to properly recognize
In the episode, we explain why Emma Bonino’s name is not mentioned as spontaneously as it deserves to be : there was no major party left behind to carry her name and her career was built around minority movements rather than a lasting political apparatus.
This mechanism is not unique to her. The history of European integration itself mainly remembers men’s names — Schuman, Monnet, Spinelli — even though women were carrying part of the same project from its earliest days. Ursula Hirschmann, for example, Altiero Spinelli’s wife, co-founded the “Women for Europe” movement in the 1970s, with the aim of ensuring that European integration would cease to be solely a project of statesmen. Her name remains largely absent from school narratives about Europe’s “founding fathers” : an omission which, fundamentally, resembles the one we document in the episode concerning Emma Bonino herself.
What This Leaves Open
We are not claiming that these three examples settle the question. Rather, we are putting them forward as threads that could be followed in future episodes : healthcare mobility as a new form of territorial inequality, the concrete mechanisms that do — or do not — advance women’s political representation and the broader tendency to remember a single name when a struggle has always been carried forward by many hands.
If one of these subjects particularly interests you, let us know : this is exactly the kind of lead we like to explore further, with the same commitment to sources as always.
Sources
Italian Ministry of Health, Report to Parliament on the Implementation of Law 194/78, 2022–2023 data
Medici del Mondo, Aborto senza numeri 2025, report presented to the Italian Chamber of Deputies
Laiga 194, Sai qual è la percentuale di obiettori e obiettrici nella tua regione?, April 2025
Editoriale Domani, Tra ostacoli amministrativi e disinformazione di stato, Italia maglia nera in Europa nell'accesso all'aborto, September 2025
SanitĂ 33, Aborto, relazione 194 in ritardo: cresce IVG farmacologica, restano divari regionali, March 2026
European Parliament, Women in Politics: Facts and Figures of the European Parliament, updated July 2025
Inter-Parliamentary Union / UN Women, Women in Politics: 2026, data as of January 1, 2026
UN News, Women in Parliament: Progress Slows, Violence Persists, March 2026
Robert Schuman Foundation, Europe of Women
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