A Kansas woman was executed Wednesday for strangling an expectant mother in Missouri and cutting the baby from her womb, the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government has put to death a female inmate.

Lisa Montgomery, 52, was scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday, January 12 at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The approved amendment to the "Manner of Federal Executions" rule gives federal prosecutors a wider variety of options for execution in order to avoid delays if the state in which the inmate was sentenced doesn't provide other alternatives.

The federal government, continuing its string of executions this year, has set the dates for two more, including the first woman in more than six decades.