About a week before Christmas in 2004, Lisa Montgomery, a 36-year-old mother of four, drove from her home in Kansas to Missouri, ostensibly to buy a rat terrier puppy from a woman shed met at a dog show earlier that year.

But it was not a pet that she was to retrieve that day. She went home with a newborn, one she acquired by murdering the babys pregnant mother.

On the ride home, she clamped the umbilical cord and cleaned the baby girl with wipes. For months, Montgomery had told her husband she was pregnant, even though she couldnt have any more children she had undergone a sterilization procedure before they met. Now, she called him to tell him that shed gone into labor while shopping and had given birth at a clinic. Back home, the couple announced the birth of their daughter to their friends and relatives. The following day, the police arrested Montgomery at her home. The baby, who was uninjured, was returned to her father.

Montgomery, who confessed, was later sentenced to death for the especially heinous murder as decided by a jury who heard her trial. After playing with the dogs in the backyard that day, Montgomery strangled Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, who was pregnant, and cut open her abdomen to remove her 8-month-old fetus.

The Trump administration announced it was reinstating executions last summer after an almost 20-year hiatus. Since they began, the federal government has executed seven people. The only woman on federal death row, Montgomery is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Dec. 8 at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

If her execution goes forward, she will be the first federal female inmate to be executed in almost 70 years. Her death is scheduled a little over a month before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden , who has pledged to end the federal death penalty.

Montgomery has exhausted all attempts to appeal her conviction and death sentence although her attorneys are exploring possible litigation. A clemency petition asking Trump to reduce Montgomerys sentence to life without parole is expected to be filed in the coming weeks.

There are certain crimes that are universally abhorred by the public, ones that evoke a primal response of disgust and revenge from those who hear about it. Violent acts against pregnant women and their fetuses fall into that category. But blind outrage over the brutality of the crime leaves little room for curiosity about why Montgomery committed the act, and whether she deserves the most severe penalty that exists in the criminal justice system.

Montgomery suffers from severe mental illness. These days, she requires a regimen of psychotropic drugs to function. According to her lawyers and witnesses, Montgomery suffered years of childhood abuse so severe it was akin to torture.

A survivor of incest and sex trafficking, she is diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, and cerebellar dysfunction, said Amy Harwell, a federal public defender in Tennessee who is working on Montgomerys case.

Mental health experts who examined her believe that her history of childhood trauma exacerbated a genetic predisposition to mental illness that ran in her family.

Mrs. Montgomery was psychotic at the time of the crime, Harwell said. She has always accepted responsibility. This is someone who was deeply remorseful, once she became appropriately medicated and had full contact with reality, although that is a situation that waxes and wanes.

Montgomerys case is not about whether she is responsible for the crime; she is. The question is, should she be put to death for it?

Is it ethical to execute a woman for actions that cannot be meaningfully separated from her mental illness and ugly history of abuse?