Emma Bonino, who rose to political prominence as a leader of campaigns by the Radical Party that legalized abortion and divorce in the 1970s in heavily Roman Catholic Italy, against the objections of the Vatican, has died. She was 78.

Her party, +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.

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