I have a confession to make.

Call it a guilty pleasure or chalk it up to the consequences of a fallen nature, but I like the Fox television show “Malcolm in the Middle.”

It is sometimes coarse, sometimes an affront to good taste and sometimes even profane, but it is most times very funny, and since the one true barometer for any comedy show is its ability to make one laugh, then at least to me, “Malcolm” is a success.

However, what I was not prepared to see on “Malcolm in the Middle” recently was a remarkably strong pro-life story.

For the uninitiated, “Malcolm in the Middle” is a sitcom about a family that puts the “fun” in dys-functional. There are the harried parents, Hal and Lois, and their four sons. It's a family that would be painted by Norman Rockwell if Norman Rockwell was addicted to pain medication.

The stories are usually told through the prism of middle-school-age Malcolm, a boy genius who is filled with doubts and anxiety. The other sons are, at times, hoodlums, malcontents, bullies and pretty much the kind of boys that would cause any parent to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.

And to top it all off, this is a show that can be found on the Fox television network, the same proud broadcaster that has given us such wholesome staples as “Temptation Island,” “Joe Millionaire” and “Celebrity Boxing.”

In other words, it is the very last place one would expect to find a pro-life message. But that's exactly what I found in one of the more recent episodes of “Malcolm in the Middle.”

Obviously, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Let's face it: If he can work the salvation of mankind through

Judas Iscariot, he can certainly work a little magic through a Fox network executive.

The storyline of the show in question found Hal and Lois being sued by Lois' mother af ter she has a fall at their house.

The mother is brilliantly portrayed by ac tress Cloris Leach man with all of the charm and warmth of a women's prison matron. The pending lawsuit would signify a pending financial disaster if it weren't for the fact that Hal and Lois live continually on the razor's edge of fiscal catastrophe anyway. Money management is not their forte. Nor is raising children, as all four of their sons seem to be going in every direction but the right one on a weekly basis.

I have a little hobby. It really isn't a very healthy one, but on the rare occasion I am watching a network sitcom, I check my watch and tick off the seconds, from the moment I begin watching to the time something offensive transpires. I usually never get past 10 seconds and when this particular episode of “Malcolm in the Middle” unveiled the plot complication of the week, my eyes instantly scanned the second hand on my Timex.

In the midst of the chaos that is the life of Hal and Lois, parents of the irresponsible Francis, parents of the thug Reese, parents of the brilliant but broken Malcolm and parents of the rather odd Dewey, comes an unexpected surprise: Lois is going to have a baby.

With remote control at the ready, I anticipated some extremely offensive use of the pregnancy. After all, this was Fox television. But there was no offensive manipulation of this plot device. Instead, it was used to present a rather refreshing — dare I say it — Catholic view of the family.

The characters of Hal and Lois are not emotionally, financially or in any other way prepared to have a child. Who is? If there was a joke about some failed form of birth control, I missed it. But regardless, the way the characters dealt with the impending arrival was as startling as it was refreshing.

The baby is “unplanned.” The humor generated by the premise of the baby's arrival was almost a retro version of what you would have seen on “I Love Lucy.” The baby may have been a “surprise,” but Hal and Lois are going to love this baby and by the end of the episode each of the four sons comes to the same conclusion. The baby is treated, pardon the pun, as a “fact of life.”

Whether some poor writer locked up in a room put his or her heart and soul into this episode in order to strike a blow for the pro-life movement may be hard to substantiate. My hunch is that through a series of happy “accidents” a little bit of the truth snuck by the internal sensors that most writers, producers and directors working on either coast seem to be born with.

Little victories. I'll take them where I can find them.

Hal and Lois are basket cases — they already have four sons they cannot control; they have financial difficulties even before the lawsuit from dear old mom that would sink most average families. Their lives are a chaotic mess — and baby makes seven.

Big families these days are a husband and wife and maybe three kids. The family in “Malcolm in the Middle” is about to explode to include seven, plus the wife of Francis, the oldest boy. Television hasn't seen this many children since “The Waltons” — and the family in “Malcolm in the Middle” would only be like the Waltons if the Waltons all got addicted to moonshine.

Robert Brennan is a

television writer in Los Angeles.