Naina Dhingra is the Director of International Policy at Advocates for Youth and serves on the Developed Country NGO Board Delegation of the Global Fund.

Last night, the government of Sweden hosted a satellite session investigating the question of morals and politics in HIV prevention. The session should have been renamed "Speaking Out Against the U.S. Government's Moralistic Approach to HIV Prevention." The Swedish Ambassador for HIV/AIDS, Lennarth Hjelmaker, introduced the session by discussing Sweden's approach to HIV. Sweden has prioritized sexual and reproductive health as a key component to successful HIV prevention and is stepping up its involvement in the global community. This is good news for the sexual and reproductive health and rights community as Sweden is the new chair of the UNAIDS governing board known as the Programme Coordinating Board (PCB).

Filling in for Dr. Mark Dybul, U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator was Warren Buckingham, the PEPFAR Country Coordinator for Kenya. Buckingham, an openly gay HIV+ man, stated that he wanted to clear up misconceptions at the conference that the U.S. approach was abstinence-only. "Nowhere in any PEPFAR country are we promoting abstinence-only," he said. The audience didn't buy it. He contradicted himself when he discussed the different types of programs, saying that there were differences in abstinence and fidelity programs versus condom programs.

When it turned to questions, I felt compelled to state my opinion – any program that segments the ABC approach to a strict AB model for young people, denying information about the C is effectively an abstinence-only approach. Advocates for Youth, in collaboration with Dr. John Santelli of the Mailman School of Public Health, has just produced a critique of PEPFAR's ABC policy guidance that found major scientific inaccuracies about young people, marriage and sex that serve as the underlying program implementation components for these abstinence-only programs.

It was clear that Buckingham didn't convince anyone as speaker after speaker raised question about the moralistic approach of PEPFAR. Farid, an HIV+ South African Muslim man stated that after working on a project with USAID, "After the [U.S. government's] obsession with moralism, I would never want to work on a USAID funded project again!" Buckingham said, "I would confess that PEPFAR is not a perfect program." That's putting it mildly. Nafis Sadik, the former Executive Director of UNFPA and current Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General for HIV/AIDS in Asia said, "Changing policies for prevention requires courage from our leadership." I only hope that this message is heard by Ambassador Mark Dybul, who joins the conference today, and other U.S. government PEPFAR officials.