WHEN I found out that Fox News had produced a special called, “Facing Reality: Choice,” I expected an anti-abortion show.

Instead, I was very pleasantly surprised – if such a thing can be said about an unpleasant and unhappy subject – that the show is, in fact, fair and balanced. To a fault.

The special tackles the always (or it should be anyway) tough decision of whether to abort a pregnancy. And it does so not by listening to politicians flap their traps, but by spending time with pregnant women facing the decision.

There’s Kayla (think Kellie Pickler), who is considering abortion even though she and her roommate, also unmarried, are pregnant at the same time and think it would be “fun” to have babies.

Brooke is 29, has a 7-year old son and a happy marriage but has been having a hard time conceiving a second time.

After years of trying, she finally becomes pregnant, but disaster strikes when she finds out that the baby may have a birth defect that will cause severe retardation and a life span of a few days.

Finally there’s Jeanne, who gets pregnant every year, never has a husband, and has no visible means of support – yet manages to score drugs. When the special starts, she’s on her fifth pregnancy. When it ends, she’s on her seventh.

Unfortunately, all the women are white, WASPY and suburban, which totally disregards urban ethnic women of color. Maybe they want to show that it’s not just inner-city women having abortions or considering them these days.

Kayla, who also was born of an unwed mother, says that she’d never considered abortion because she’s a churchgoer, and in fact even wore a chastity ring all through high school. Then she became a party girl. So much for the chastity ring. And so much for her decision never to have an abortion.

Jeanne is a totally unsympathetic woman who has horrible relationships, does drugs and has kids. In that order.

It’s hard to know which she does more of, since she’s always pregnant and always involved with one drug dealer or another.

She generally does not believe in abortion, but seems to have found a nice little racket of getting infertile adoptive families to support her with rent, food, clothing, medical care and expenses both during the pregnancy and for six weeks afterwards. Her last baby was born addicticted.

But it’s Brooke and her husband that will rip your heart out. They know during her entire pregnancy that she’s going to have a severely damaged baby girl who will die within hours or days.

Between that birth and Kayla’s filmed abortion, it’s a tough show that will have you reaching for the birth control pills.

A good, even-handed job.

“Facing Reality: Choice”
Tonight at 9 on Fox News Channel