Of course, the super-size family – and its breeding habits – practically invite our judgments. The Duggars have always been open about their long-ago miscarriage – which occurred when, Michelle says, she went back on the pill after her first child, got pregnant and “ended up losing the baby.” They suggest the birth control caused “one of our own babies to be destroyed.” Eighteen kids later, they couldn’t be accused of using birth control. So what might they think of God’s plan for them now?

Similarly, the Duggars went into this pregnancy knowing that it was risky. Michelle is a 45-year-old grandmother with 19 kids already, one whose last pregnancy featured a life-threatening bout of preeclampsia and the premature birth of daughter Josie. For the couple, who say that “children are a reward” from God, this possibility must surely have occurred to them.

So they’ve got plenty of kids already. This one was a long shot. They’ve ascribed a prior miscarriage to birth control. They have it coming, don’t they? Who wouldn’t call them “ridiculous” and “insane” for even attempting a 20th baby in the first place? Or at least, among those with a softer touch, decide that “Bless her, but personally I think 19 children is enough” and say, “This is a terrible thing but happens to many people across the world every day.” Compassion: now with qualifications!

Of course, there are commenters out there with more sympathy – generally those who’ve been through it themselves. “Having miscarried three times myself, I know the pain she is feeling and my heart goes out to her,” wrote a woman on Yahoo. A commenter on People observed, “As a mother of three beautiful little girls I have suffered through two miscarriages that left me both sad and broken and longing to know what if.”

Michelle Duggar is currently resting at home. Until recently, she was likely feeling the tumbles and kicks of her newest child. Now, she carries her lifeless baby inside her body as she waits to miscarry. “Our doctor said it was wise to let this miscarriage happen naturally,” she told People this week. Duggar added that “I feel like my heart broke telling my children.”

You probably wouldn’t make the same reproductive choices the Duggars have. Most of us wouldn’t. But anyone who has either endured a miscarriage or loved someone who has knows what a physically and emotionally grueling ordeal it is. What is to the world someone never even met or experienced is, to the family, a person who was going be part of it. Little fingers to be kissed, chubby legs that would have, in time, run around the house creating chaos. And then, suddenly, that dream is gone. That is not something easily brushed off – it’s a permanent loss. Your kids don’t all run together after the first five or six; you aren’t issued a “get out of grief” pass when you lose a pregnancy after several successful births. Life doesn’t work that way. The human heart sure doesn’t, regardless of whether it’s the first baby or the 21st. Because it’s that hoped for baby, that unique, irreplaceable life, that demands to be considered. A life to be celebrated when it begins. And to be mourned when it ends.

Regular reality-TV viewers also report spending a significantly larger amount of time on their appearance and are far likelier to agree with statements like “Being mean earns you more respect than being nice.” Apparently, reality fans don’t join the Girl Scouts to make friends; they join to win.

But maybe not everything dished out on reality TV has a soul-crushing effect. It turns out, according to the poll, that reality watchers exceed their peers’ confidence levels regarding “almost every personal characteristic” — including maturity, intelligence, and humor. They’re also more likely to aspire to lead and more aware of social issues. Two-thirds said that the shows have sparked important conversations with parents and friends.

Is it possible that somewhere amid all the catfights and hot-tub hookups and dates with rehab, there are valuable lessons to be had? Could Snooki teach our little girls something beyond how to rock a pouf? On that latter question, I’m going to guess probably not a whole lot. And that’s where the study’s methodology comes into play. The Girl Scout poll defines reality TV as pertaining to popular genres of both competition shows (like “American Idol”) — and “real-life” shows (such as “Jersey Shore”). It doesn’t seem to distinguish between girls who watch “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” with their families and those who are off devouring “Dog the Bounty Hunter” solo.

I don’t know about your family, but my 7-year-old could distinguish between “The Amazing Race” and “Real Housewives,” and I suspect her emotional takeaways from the two would be different. I say that because I’ve seen it in action. It was Mondo’s admission that he was HIV-positive on “Project Runway” that turned out to be the first time either of my daughters heard the term, and it wound up sparking a family conversation about HIV and AIDS. My children have also learned, via Tim Gunn, everything they’ll ever need about impeccable grooming and meeting rigorous deadlines. From “American Idol” this year they gained a deeper insight into the neighborhood  kids they know who are on the Asperger’s scale. But they still don’t know who Kim Kardashian or the Situation are — and I’m keeping it that way as long as possible.

Assuming, as the Girl Scouts study seems to have done, that “reality” is broad enough to encompass both “The Girls Next Door” and “Mythbusters” isn’t quite fair to either young girls or to television. But flawed as it may be, the results do suggest that certain kinds of reality shows can teach our daughters more than just how to throw drinks in each other’s faces –  and that if you’re paying attention, there are teachable moments to be found in the unlikeliest places.

We all knew before this new batch of episodes started that “Real Housewives” husband Russell Armstrong killed himself in August 2011. We knew that some of his family members blamed the unrelenting public scrutiny built into the show’s production for hastening his death, and that the tension with his wife, Taylor, was more than a tabloid spat between shallow rich folk — that it was, in fact, symptomatic of something far darker than the typical unscripted cable show could handle. But “Real Housewives” either ineptly failed to integrate our awareness of the tragedy into the plot in any meaningful way, or else decided to plug its ears and tiptoe through the hand-woven silk origami tulips. Is this approach evidence of a conscious creative choice — the calm before the storm? If this franchise weren’t so committed to manufactured melodrama and toxic materialism, I’d offer a very tentative “yes,” but I suspect it’s more likely the case of the show not having the slightest clue of what to do with such explosive material — material that it frankly never should have tried to deal with on-screen, because it is morally, intellectually and creatively unequipped to get anywhere near it without making it dishonest and trite. We’re not talking about “Deadliest Catch” here, or even “Survivor” or freaking “Celebrity Rehab.” It’s “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

We’ve watched Taylor, Lisa, Kyle, Kim, Camille, Adrienne and friends skate through life same as always, planning million-dollar Las Vegas bachelorette parties and attending an engagement shindig in a Rhode Island-size mansion with a secret orgy room. We’ve seen them scowl and gripe their way through Russell and Taylor Armstrong’s daughter Kennedy’s fifth birthday party, a presidentially lavish affair that included a private performance by a pop star the child had never heard of and the gift of a horse that probably no one in her family would ever visit again.

The show’s standard M.O. — showcase copious wealth; watch rich women get drunk and shriek at each other; repeat — seemed grotesque enough in this political climate. Season 2 of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” aired during a fall dominated by images of citizens protesting corporate welfare and the unfair accumulation of wealth by the super-rich.  But when you factor in Russell Armstrong’s suicide and the show’s craven and repugnant handling of same, “Real Housewives” goes from irksome to obscene. The show’s wacky “Desperate Houswives”-rip-off score, with its plucked violins going “Doot doot DOOT doot!”  as the show’s soused heroines stumble from one catfight to the next, is creepy enough to make Bernard Herrmann shiver in his grave.

In the last few episodes, “Real Housewives” has introduced and stridently repeated accusations that Russell Armstrong beat his wife and even broke her jaw. But because this was never an overt factor in the narrative before Season 2, and because it’s been framed in fuzzy third-hand terms — with Camille repeating stories that Taylor told her about events that happened off-camera, and warning her, “You need to be honest, because that’s not cool!” — the whole thing reeks of opportunism. It’s as if the producers had an emergency meeting after the suicide and, after what felt like an appropriate interval of weeping and binge-drinking, agreed that in every crisis lies opportunity.

When “Real Housewives” frames the tension between Camille and Taylor as a case of two friends fighting over inappropriate disclosure of a secret — in this case, alleged domestic abuse of Taylor by Russell — the show cluelessly reinforces the same cycles of dysfunction that it congratulates itself for bravely addressing. (Taylor spoke to People Magazine about the abuse allegations near the end of the show’s season two production cycle, and a month before her husband’s suicide.) And then the series manages to make things even worse, by tacitly vilifying a man who cannot defend himself against the charges that the characters and the producers are lodging against him. Russell has made very few appearances in the narrative, but every time he shows up on-screen, the editors fixate on his most glowering, coldly furious expressions, and the score shifts into a menacing atonality. There was a moment during the pony party episode where Russell and Taylor had words, and the music went into super-scary “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy” mode. I half-expected an “Omen”-style close-up of Russell with glowing red eyes.

It’s possible that such moments of coiled anger are indicative of a homicidal monster who would fly into a lethal rage if he weren’t at a child’s birthday party. But it might also be evidence of slowly accumulating frustration and anger that all those cameras were constantly poking their lenses into every corner of his life, encouraging his wife and her friends to guzzle massive amounts of alcohol at every possible opportunity and “confide” in each other under hot lights and grow unhinged enough to call each other bitches and whores and worse — and that all of it would ultimately end up on national television and the covers of tabloids.

The distorting effect of all those lights and cameras cannot be discounted when we think about the tragedy of the Armstrong household. The whole thing is unnatural, bizarre, sick. Human beings were just not meant to live their lives this way. We should never forget that, ever. Even politicians, star athletes and rock stars have more privacy than these people. We can speculate that Russell Armstrong may in fact have been an abusive brute, or that Taylor may have been exaggerating or inventing details after the fact; we’ll probably never know for sure.

But I think we can agree that “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” is not the best forum in which to examine the matter, and that if it could not restrain itself from continuing, it should have tried to find some way to present all this heartbreak and horror with a shred of nuance and intelligence. It should not have presented Russell Armstrong as a psycho powder keg, and played up the sewing-circle theatrics of Camille’s disclosures about what Taylor told her, and it should not have added extra layers of nastiness by feasting on Taylor’s meltdown at a party in this week’s episode — a party that almost certainly wouldn’t have existed in the first place, much less spiraled into a drunken, profane screaming match, if the producers of “Real Housewives” hadn’t been perched on the edge of the melodrama with their cameras like electronic vultures. “I hate drama,” Camille told the camera during last night’s episode. Alas, she and the other housewives are required as performers to take part in it anyhow, preferably while swilling down glass after glass of alcohol to make things more “interesting.” And so they do. The program is a zoo, and they’re the self-committed animals we’ve come to gawk at; the producers are sadistic zookeepers, trying to rile up the beasts however they can.

I am not saying that “Real Housewives” killed Russell Armstrong, or that its intrusions had some bearing on whatever happened between him and Taylor behind closed doors. But there is no universe in which appearing on a show like this could have helped them. There’s no universe in which one can defend “Real Housewives” for the way it has dealt with this tragedy. And there’s no universe in which one can simply brush off the series as a “guilty pleasure” — not after watching the cast members, the producers and the network continue to exploit this catastrophe week in and week out. And anyone who watches a series like this for pleasure and discusses it as frivolous entertainment — as if it were a cooking or travel show or even a “Jackass”-style stunt compendium, or worse still, as if the “characters” weren’t actual people who agreed to let themselves be exploited and distorted by television — is “guilty,” indeed.

Everything about this season has embraced the ugliest and most reductive cliches about so-called reality television. The producers’ and the network’s financially motivated determination to go forward with the season under the guise of truth, healing and closure was disgusting enough. The housewives’ continuing to participate in offscreen P.R. — as if they were appearing on “The Amazing Race” or “Dancing With the Stars” — has been revolting, too. Last night, Taylor Armstrong told “Watch What Happens Live” that her behavior at the drunken Malibu party was the result of being abused by her husband. She never mentioned the hothouse environment of the TV series, with its circling cameras, bright lights and drama-lubricating booze, as factors. “My biggest fears were unraveling,” she said. “I was losing my mind. I was really terrified.”

Emotional pornography, thy name is Bravo.

Update: This piece has been corrected to straighten out the chronology of Taylor Armstrong’s public statements about being abused.

The spectacularly fecund Duggars entered the reality game already way ahead of the Gosselins, and even left Octomom Nadya Suleman in the dust. They’ve been a source of weird fascination ever since they welcomed their 15th child on their first television special seven years — and five pregnancies — ago. And each time their brood increases, so does the public scorn. Along with occasional good wishes, commenters on the L.A. Times website have been writing things like: “How about you bolt your knees together?” and “Lady, your hooha isn’t a clown car!”

The 45-year-old Michelle Duggar sees it a little differently. Before appearing on the “Today” show Tuesday, she said, “I was not thinking that God would give us another one, and we are just so grateful.” God, unfortunately, could not be reached for comment. On their TLC Web page, a stiffly “Oh Lord I am so screwed”-looking Jim Bob Duggar says, “Wow. I can’t believe it. Twenty. I can’t… I thought we’d maybe have two or three. It’s a miracle. Twenty. It blows my mind. I’m sure it blows your mind. This is amazing” (trails off in hyperventilating quasi laughter).

Unlike their enthusiastic baby-making TV peers like the Gosselins and Octomom, the Duggars are not fertility-treatment espousing litter droppers. In fact, their strange allure stems from precisely the opposite place – the fact that Joe Bob Duggar’s sperm count is to fertility what Ted Williams’ batting average is to baseball. Off the freakin’ charts. The couple have two sets of twins, but basically they’ve been cranking out kids since the ’80s at roughly the same measured pace that Woody Allen releases new movies. They’re not living on public assistance; they’re not asking for your money. They’re just a nice Christian family from Arkansas who could teach tribbles a thing or two about breeding.

Nevertheless, Americans seem to have a strained relationship with the family, with a tremendous amount of moral outrage attached. Michelle Duggar is not the spry 20-something she was when she got into this game. She’s now a grandmother in her mid-40s. During her last pregnancy two years ago, she developed life-threatening preeclampsia. When daughter Josie was delivered at 25 weeks, she weighed 1 pound, 6 ounces. (The toddler is doing fine now.) Though Jim Bob Duggar says, “Michelle is probably in better health now than she was 10 years ago,” a lady with 19 other kids and a history of preeclampsia heads into another pregnancy with considerable challenges.

That’s why both MSNBC and Fox News today asked if the latest pregnancy was “safe.” “Today” contributor Dr. Nancy Snyderman, meanwhile, called it “a high-risk pregnancy,” adding “That uterus can’t have any spring in it anymore.” More bluntly, a CNN commenter Wednesday wrote, “Can somebody spay and castrate this couple?”

The idea that any humans — even those with the religious conviction and financial means to do so — would keep adding to a family of super-size proportions seems all but, well, inconceivable. Add to it the very real risk that someday luck runs out on these folks, combined with the sideshow aspect of an unusual clan, and you’ve got perfect conditions for a whole heap of public scolding.

Yet on their TLC site, Michelle says, “We are really, really thankful” for this new child. Jim Bob adds, “I know a lot of you out there think, ‘What have they done?’ But … we consider each child a gift and a blessing from God. And our goal is to train our children to love God and to serve others and hopefully make a difference in the world.”

We all consider our children blessings. I named my second child Beatrice precisely because it means blessing. I also think Mirena is a beautiful name, because it’s the device that assured I could not get knocked up 18 more times after my lovely Beatrice.

I have a friend expecting a baby she already knows has a heart condition and Down syndrome. She told me the other day, “People keep saying, ‘Maybe the doctors are wrong. Maybe there will be a miracle.’ Why can’t they understand that maybe this baby is the miracle, just as he is?” The Duggars are similarly holding steadfast to their belief that miracles don’t look the same to every set of eyes. And they see baby 20 as just as much of a blessing as No. 1 . The Duggars’ blessings aren’t yours or mine. They’ve made choices few of us would, but they’ve determined to accept them with as much grace and gratitude as they can muster. Because this is what reproductive freedom and choice look like. And as long as there’s still spring in Michelle’s uterus, they’re going to keep going – 20 and counting.

Citing irreconcilable differences, Kardashian said Monday, “I hope everyone understands this was not an easy decision. I had hoped this marriage was forever, but sometimes things don’t work out as planned. We remain friends and wish each other the best.” But Humphries sounds blindsided by the whole thing. In a counter-statement, he declared, “I love my wife and am devastated to learn she filed for divorce. I’m committed to this marriage and everything this covenant represents,” he says in the statement, “and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it work.”

Maybe there’s a hint in the preview for the new season of “Kourtney and Kim Take New York,” in which Kim, made-up within an inch of “Ru Paul’s Drag Race,” demands of her new husband, “How am going to have my career and live in Minnesota?” To which a sweat-shirted Kris replies, “Baby, by the time you have kids and they’re in school, no one will care about you.” Oh, Kris, I don’t think we need to wait that long.

Just because the other 99 percent of the country is losing sleep over mortgage payments and student loans doesn’t mean the fascination with excess goes away. Americans scrimped their pennies to go see fizzy, high society, screwball comedies during the Depression. The mid-’70s recession dovetailed neatly with the excesses of glam-rock and disco. And now, as our banks are nickel and diming us for using our debit cards to pay for our value meals, we still make blockbusters of multimillion-dollar movie extravaganzas and DVR the expensive follies of Housewives, Playmates and heavily shellacked pageant moms. And right there, at the crossroads of aspirational glamour and straight-up schadenfreude, are the big badonkadonked members of Bruce Jenner’s extended family. Kim and Kris’ two-part wedding was the most watched special in E! network history. We only have ourselves to blame, America.

But at this point, it seems Kim isn’t the one who ought to be throwing in the towel. As PRI’s Celeste Headlee pointed out on Twitter Tuesday morning, “The Kardashian wedding cost $10 mill, so $138,000 for every day of their now-defunct marriage.” And, as a nightly entertainment show hilariously mused Monday night, this whole fiasco might just finally hurt the Kardashian “credibility.” The credibility you were perhaps unaware existed until just now.

Ill-starred romances happen to the best of us, and not every love affair is meant to go the distance. Kim surely understands – she divorced producer Damon Thomas in 2004. And if you want to build a television brand around shopping or smiling at parties or whatever it is the Kardashians do, have at it. If you want to call it something other than reality, mazel tov. But the accelerated love story of Kim and Kris now looks even more like a cynical stunt by a Hollywood network and an attention-hungry family than it did back in May. And who knew that was possible?

Maybe other women can make a “not easy” decision about the rest of their lives in three and a half months. And others can get gown designers and caterers and magazines to throw around $10 million on a love that’s evaporated before wedding guests gnawed through that six-foot cake. But why would the rest of us want to watch these people? The notion of fairy tales and romance, for anyone who bought into it in the first place, should be about as dead as Kris Humphries’ chance of ever taking a shower with Kim Kardashian again. And for those who watch just to get their disgust at bourgeois excess on, that shark was jumped 10 million bucks and two Vera Wangs ago. All that’s left now is a woman with a “career” whose professional highlight is getting married. Christ, even Paris Hilton didn’t pull that stunt. Kim will no doubt keep the gifts. But one thing we can take back is our attention.