The Carter Center announced Saturday that former President Jimmy Carter has entered home hospice care.
The charity, founded by the 98-year-old former president, said on Twitter that after a series of brief hospitalizations, Carter “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical procedures.”
He has the full support of his medical team and family, who “request privacy at this time and are grateful for the concerns of his many admirers.”
Carter, a Democrat, became the 39th US President when he defeated former President Gerald R. Ford in 1976. He only served a single term and was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
In August 2015, Carter had a small cancerous mass removed from his liver. The following year, Carter announced that he needed no further treatment because an experimental drug eliminated all signs of cancer.
Carter celebrated his recent birthday in October with family and friends in Plains, the small Georgia town where he and his wife Rosalynn were born in the years between World War I and the Great Depression.
The Carter Center, which the 39th President and former First Lady founded after their first term in the White House, last year marked 40 years of promoting democracy and conflict resolution, policing elections and advancing public health in developing countries.
James Earl Carter Jr. won the 1976 presidential election after campaigning as the little-known one-term governor of Georgia. His surprise appearance at the Iowa caucuses made the small Midwestern state an epicenter of presidential politics. Carter went on to defeat Ford in the general election, largely due to strength sweeping the South before his home region heavily shifted to Republicans.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to receive more English language news from the EL PAÍS USA Edition