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Shortly after Gloucester County, New Jersey resident Jackie Mancinelli was hired as a high school English teacher in Camden County in 2014, she suffered a miscarriage late in her first trimester.

After the miscarriage was confirmed by an ultrasound test, she returned to work the next day as if nothing had happened, because she said she felt nervous to take time off.

“I really struggled to get through the school day, I broke down crying in front of my students and it was really difficult, and no one in my building had any idea what was happening,” Mancinelli said.

Two years later, the Voorhees teacher had an emergency cesarean section after carrying her baby for 33 weeks, but the child only lived for one hour after being born.

Mancinelli was distraught, but under New Jersey law, if a baby dies, the parent is no longer eligible to take family leave time off, because the law stipulates you can only care for another, not yourself.

She used sick time and unpaid leave to take a break from her job and was forced to take a custodial job cleaning classrooms over the summer to make ends meet.

In 2021, she founded Start Healing Together, a nonprofit organization that advocates for workplace rights for grieving families experiencing pregnancy loss, infertility and adoption loss.

“Their worlds are falling apart, the idea of having to return to work just to earn a paycheck to pay bills. It’s really inhumane,” she said.

Mancinelli then worked with Assemblywoman Shanique Speight on legislation to provide bereavement leave for those dealing with this kind of loss.

“If you want that employee to come back strong, you definitely want to give them time to properly grieve,” Speight said.

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The legal battle over New York’s congestion pricing is not over yet, thanks to neighboring New Jersey.

Federal Judge Leo Gordon has set a Friday 3 p.m. hearing in Newark — just 33 hours before congestion pricing is presently scheduled to begin — to consider a Temporary Restraining Order filed by the state of New Jersey.

Garden State officials and attorneys who’ve argued that Bergen County and other areas west of the Hudson will suffer environmentally from new traffic patterns declined comment. But a spokesman for Governor Kathy Hochul indicated the nation’s first congestion toll will begin as scheduled.

“Congestion pricing is still going to take effect on Sunday January 5th,” said Avi Small, the New York governor’s press secretary.

Hochul had paused congestion pricing back in June, but unpaused it in November at a lower fee.

Years in the making, the congestion pricing program tolls drivers entering Manhattan south of 61st Street. The peak price for cars with EZ-Pass is $9. Off peak rates drop to $2.25. The MTA has touted the toll as a way to generate billions to modernize mass transit.

New Yorkers who rely on the subway say the new fee mirrors what several international cities have implemented.

“I lived in London a little bit and I know it’s helped a lot there,” said Claire O’Donnell-McCarthy, who lives just north of the Manhattan zone on the west side.

She scoffed at New Jersey’s 11th-hour request for an injunction: “it’s not their place to say what we do in Manhattan.”

But City Council member Bob Holden of Queens, who has also sued the MTA on the grounds the new toll hurts outer borough residents disproportionately, predicts even if the congestion cameras get switched on this weekend, another court hearing in a case brought by Hempstead looms in just two weeks.

“It’ll start but then it’ll stop. That’s my guess,” Holden told NBC New York.

The MTA declined to comment on all the last minute legal maneuvers.