Lila Rose, president of Live Action (CNSNews.com/Penny Starr)

(CNSNews.com) – “One of the biggest threats, the biggest killers of girls today, attacks on woman today is sex-selective abortion," Lila Rose, pro-life activist and president of Live Action , said in a panel presentation at the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) on Thursday, March 12.

Archbishop Bernardito Auza, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, and C-Fam’s International Youth Coalition (IYC) hosted the event entitled “Young and Courageous Because Life Can’t Wait,” as part of the annual Commission which runs from March 9-20. (C-Fam is the abbreviation for the Center for Family & Human Rights.)

“I'm not sure how many people are aware of this but one of the challenges that we're facing in the United States and other countries across the world is what The Economist has called the war on baby girls,” said Rose. “And there's over 100 million missing girls in the world today because of sex-selective abortion killing off children in the womb -- particularly little girls because they're not seen as valuable as men, as valuable as boys.”

“I'm not sure this is even talked about in all of this entire conference,” she said. “It needs to be a core issue because one of the biggest threats, the biggest killers of girls today, attacks on woman today is sex-selective abortion."

The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women adopted a political declaration at the opening session that made no mention of abortion or reproductive health.

The declaration called for accelerated implementation of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, which focused on 12 areas, including impoverished women, economic and political participation, and difficulties facing girls. The declaration commits the commission "to strive for the full realization of gender equality and the empowerment of women by 2030."

“MCCL Go,” a pro-life NGO global outreach program of the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Education Fund, issued a news release just prior to the CSW pointing out that the Bejing Platform “describes forced abortion, forced sterilization, sex-selective abortion, and female infanticide as acts of violence against women (paragraph 115).”

The Beijing Platform for Action also calls for the elimination of “all forms of discrimination against the girl child and the root causes of son preference, which result in harmful and unethical practices such as prenatal sex selection and female infanticide; this is often compounded by the increasing use of technologies to determine foetal sex, resulting in abortion of female foetuses.”

It calls for governments to “enact and enforce legislation protecting girls from all forms of violence, including female infanticide and prenatal sex selection.”

China’s One Child Policy, which causes sex selective abortion, is still very much in place.

In the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP have called sex-selective abortion bans “racist,” claiming that they “rely on harmful racial stereotypes to stigmatize, shame, and discriminate against Black women and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women who seek abortions.”

"One of the things that's been very disappointing about Planned Parenthood in the United States is their complete rejection of banning sex-selective abortion,” Rose said.

A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood told The Huffington Post that “the organization condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide ‘high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into’ its health centers. That means that no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions (Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Illinois).”