Ninety-eight year old former President Jimmy Carter has chosen to receive hospice care at his home, according to an announcement by the Carter Center on Saturday:
“After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention. He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.”
Carter, a Democrat born in Plains, Ga. who had served as the governor of Georgia from 1971-1975, was president from 1977 to 1981. America’s 39th president, he served one term and lost to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Carter made an indelible impression on Alaska’s future when he used the Antiquities Act to temporarily designate 56 million acres as 17 national monuments by executive order on Dec. 1, 1978.
In 1980, he signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. ANILCA established more national parks, national wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas than any in history and “has been called our country’s most significant conservation law. It was my honor to work with Congress and citizens throughout our great nation on the passage of ANILCA,” Carter said. There are many Alaskans who disagreed with ANILCA and has been the subject of legal disputes over the decades over the “no more” clause, which said the federal government would withdraw no more lands.
The signing of ANILCA was a historic time for Alaska. Sen. Ted Stevens, Sen. Mike Gravel, and Congressman Don Young were in office at the time; all three have passed in the past 13 years.
Carter and his wife Rosalynn were longtime volunteers and supporters of Habitat for Humanity.
In recent years he has suffered from cancer, both liver and brain, and he fell and broke his hip in 2019. Carter is the first U.S. president to reach the age of 95, and in 2017 was the oldest former president to attend a presidential inauguration, which was on the 40th anniversary of his own inauguration. He was born the same year as the late President George H.W. Bush, who died in 2018.
