“Babies are not the sum of their body parts,” U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) told the House’s Select Panel on Infant Lives today in a hearing focused on the sales of baby parts for profit.

“Babies are not meant to be bought,” continued the freshman senator. “Babies are not meant to be sold. Babies are just that — babies. They’re meant to be welcomed and rejoiced over, held and nurtured.”

Sasse, who is pushing for the Infant Born Alive Protection Act in the Senate, was the second of eight witnesses who spoke to the Panel, which was created last year to investigate the nation’s fetal harvesting industry in light of video evidence that the abortion industry profits from the sales of body parts. Profiting off of fetal harvesting is a violation of federal law.

The often tense and combative hearing centered on StemExpress, a tissue procurement company being investigated by the Panel for allegedly profiting off of baby body parts — and helping abortion clinics to do the same.

Democrats insisted StemExpress only reimbursed abortion clinics for the costs associated with harvesting body parts.

However, according to the documentation  presented Wednesday, abortion clinics incur minimal or no cost when harvesting baby parts for research or other purposes. Republican members laid out how StemExpress would incur all costs associated with harvesting fetal organs and body parts by having technicians inside clinics so abortionists and their staff would not expend time, energy or other resources.  The process of harvesting includes, but is not limited to, speaking to women for permission to use their aborted children for research, gathering the body parts, and then processing and transporting these “products of conception.”

If the clinics did none of the harvesting work, Republicans argued, then any money paid the clinics has to be considered profit.

Democrats called the documentation unproven and based in part upon Center for Medical Progress lead investigator David Daleiden’s undercover videos. StemExpress also challenged the documents’ authenticity while at the same time claiming some were obtained from the company illegally.

Republicans accused Democrats of leaking information about the investigation to StemExpress.

Partisan haggling aside, former U.S. prosecutor Brian Lennon testified that “there is proof without a reasonable doubt” both clinics and procurement company illegally profited from the sale of fetal baby parts:

I believe a competent and ethical prosecutor could determine probable cause that both the abortion clinic and the procurement business violated the statute, aided and abetted one another in violating the statue and likely conspired together to violate the statute.