The passage of the 2005 amendments to the Bankruptcy Code represents the turning of a page in the long history of personal bankruptcy in the United States. At the very moment that European countries are liberalizing their treatment of individual debtors, the U.S. Congress has embraced changes intended to make bankruptcy difficult or impossible for many financially troubled Americans. The primary justification for this wholesale revision of the accessibility of the consumer bankruptcy system has been the repeated claim that the extraordinary increase in bankruptcy filings is the consequence of declining stigma. In effect, the argument is that a growing moral slackness causes people who can repay their debts to seek the too-easy protection of bankruptcy. This Article reports the third of three comparable empirical observations of individual bankruptcy spread over twenty years. It establishes a baseline against which the effects of the new amendments can be examined. The data we present are not consistent with the claim that declining bankruptcy stigma has fueled an increase in bankruptcy filings. Instead, the data are far more consistent with the hypothesis that increased filings result from increased financial distress, and they hint that, despite loud claims to the contrary, the stigma of bankruptcy may actually be increasing...