Jimmy Carter receives home hospice care

Jimmy Carter, America’s longest-living former president, has decided to forego medical treatment and seek home hospice care, the Carter Center said in a statement Saturday.

The center’s statement on Saturday said that after a “series of brief hospitalizations,” Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care in lieu of additional medical procedures.”

The Carter Center is the former president’s human rights organization housed at Emory University in Atlanta.

The statement did not specify why the former president had been treated. Carter was previously treated for metastatic melanoma, a form of cancer, and has suffered several falls in recent years. In 2019 he underwent surgery to relieve the pressure on his brain caused by bleeding from the falls.

“He has the full support of his family and medical team,” the Carter Center’s statement said Saturday.

“The Carter family requests privacy at this time and is grateful for the concern of his many admirers.”

Carter, a Democrat, served as America’s 39th President from 1977 to 1981. A former peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia, he lost his re-election to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980.

But he has been hailed as a humanitarian leader both in the United States and abroad in the decades since leaving office. Carter received the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for co-founding the Carter Center, which works to advance human rights and democracy around the world.

Carter lives with his wife, Rosalynn Carter, in Plains, Georgia, the small town where he was born and raised. The couple, who are among the best-known volunteers at affordable housing charity Habitat for Humanity, have been married for 76 years.