Steve Adubato sits down with New Jersey’s First Lady, Tammy Murphy, to discuss systemic racial inequalities and her mission to make New Jersey the safest and most equitable place to raise a child. 

Steve asks First Lady Tammy Murphy about the Nuture NJ initiative, and the progress being made. Murphy says “nurture NJ is an initiative that we unveiled in 2019. The purpose of Nurture NJ is not only to raise awareness of the problems that we have here in New Jersey with respect to infant maternal Health. For those who do not know we are 47th in the country in terms of maternal mortality rates. When you dig down you find that if you are a person of color your chances of either dying or having challenges from maternity-related complications are significantly greater, in fact, they are over six times greater than that of a white woman. For a baby of color or black baby is three times more likely than a white baby to die before his or her first birthday. So, being a mom as I am one cannot possibly know those statistics and not feel a need to fix our challenges here in Jersey. Nurture NJ, the goal of nurture NJ is to both reduce our maternal mortality rates by 50 over five years and to eliminate the inequities in birth outcomes.”