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Feminists witness legal worlds as they observe, document and share nothing less than the reproduction of life itself. The world of the abortion trail, where people and things move across borders to change life's reproduction, has generated a rich variety of legal sources, figures and objects for feminist witnessing. In watching how feminist activists improvise with sources, figures and objects of legal consciousness on the abortion trail, this article seeks to contribute to critical understanding of a plurality of witnessing practice, particularly as it emerges in diaspora space. Focusing on Murphy's concept of immodest witnessing, with its attention to bodies, protocols and apparatuses as constituents of knowledge, the article thinks with the diasporic feminist performance group, Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A., about how they used self-examination, collaboration and knowledge-sharing on the trail to repeal Ireland's 8thAmendment. The article argues that their improvisation with legal consciousness of reproductive choice enacts 'cheeky witnessing'. Cheeky witnessing has three dynamics as a method of observation. First, it is messy and irreverent in innovating with names to display the mixed genealogies of feminist knowledge. Second, cheeky witnessing generates novel subject-figures who make connections between different reproductive labourers as observers of the trail in diaspora space. Third, cheeky witnessing places funny objects, knickers in this instance, so as to join up particular public locations and make them more, if unevenly, comfortable for sexual and reproductive bodies. Cheeky witnessing shows us how committed and partial practices play a role in speaking across interests and experiences, in stretching the legal imagination and in sustaining the everyday grind of making a better world.

Significant developments in medical research and technology have meant that the process of reproduction is increasingly affected by the consumption of a variety of services and goods. Individuals intervene in their own reproductive processes as they eat particular foods, take particular drugs and avail themselves of diagnostic and reproductive services. Although such developments have been analysed by feminists in terms of their ethical consequences or their contribution to the commodification of reproduction, they have not been evaluated in terms of their contribution to reproductive consumption. This article argues that we can avoid the reductiveness of critiques of commodified reproduction by developing a conceptual framework of reproductive consumption. Thinking through reproductive consumption also enables feminist analysis to expand our understanding of the gendered aspects of consumption. Most feminist work on consumption practices has focused on the domestic sphere as a site of consumption or on the role of sex and sexuality in promoting consumption. This article's analysis of reproductive consumption adds to this work by revealing ways in which biological reproduction itself is a site of consuming desires and needs, and is permeated by socio-economic forces. In developing a theoretical framework for analysing reproductive consumption, this article argues that consumption produces adaptive value as an object of exchange is acquired and adapted in order to satisfy some need or desire. In making this argument I draw on O'Brien, who argued that reproduction produces syntheticvalue by synthesizing reason and nature in bringing another human being into the world. In doing so she used Marx's method of extracting the concept of commodity value from capitalist exchange relations. Similarly, I analyse the relations of consumption in order to distil a value that is specific to consumption. Reproductive consumption identifies the reproductive consumer as someone who adapts objects of consumption to her own reproductive needs and desires as she negotiates her reproductive nature. Thinking about reproduction and consumption in terms of each other helps us to identify how reproduction is brought about through a taste for particular goods and services, and how consumption works through the reproductive, as well as the sexual, body.