why did Roe happen when it did

[Senator Incitatus]

Abortion wasn't the contentious issue that it is today back then. The entire pro-life movement was started by Republicans as a way to gain more political power, using Roe as a motivator.  That's the reason why I doubt the Republicans will ever seriously undermine Roe.

This is absolutely fiction. The pro-life movement started as non- or bi-partisan and found its home in the Republican Party only really after those activists moved there.

The reasons anti-abortion activists became Republican are complex and multi-dimensional in the early stages, but it's absolutely WRONG to claim that Republicans started or even significantly supported the early anti-abortion activists. Those activists were largely Catholic and therefore also largely members of the Democratic Party at the time Roe was written. See, for example, Congressman Chris Smith, who was the Democratic chair of the NJ Right to Life Committee but ran for Congress as a Republican.

Abortion was also hugely divisive through the 1976 primary between Ford and Reagan. Betty Ford gave a famous interview in support of the right to an abortion, and her husband (though he claimed to personally oppose abortion during the 1976 campaign) continued to tell the Republicans to abandon focus on abortion until his death. The Republican establishment of 1973–76 still had a large and powerful contingent that was supportive of abortion, meaning your imagined astroturf campaign would have been impossible.

I would recommend you read The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein, which goes into a great level of detail on the transition of working-class social conservative movements to branches of the Republican Party, with more specific examples.

[Senator Incitatus]

Also important to note that Nixon had two failed nominations of more conservative judges.

[Senator Incitatus]

Also important to note that Nixon had two failed nominations of more conservative judges.

I'm actually surprised Haynsworth got shot down. He probably would have ended up like Lewis Powell. Carswell was an utter troglodyte though.

I actually did a bit of research on the Carswell and Haynsworth nominations as an undergraduate. Haynsworth got the short end of the stick because he was replacing Abe Fortas, who resigned over ethics issues... under pressure from Nixon and John Mitchell (via Earl Warren). Some scholars of the Court argue that Haynsworth was shanked by moderates and Southerners as revenge for Fortas's ousting.

You could argue somewhat convincingly that if Nixon had switched the order of the nominations, he'd have gotten the man he wanted in the first place.

[Senator Incitatus]

A succession of Republican presidents have appointed justices to the Court in the hope & expectation that they would vote to overrule Roe. Thus far, they've been disappointed, as justices like John Paul Stevens (Ford), Sandra Day O'Connor (Reagan), Anthony Kennedy (Reagan), & David Souter (H.W. Bush) have risen above partisan ideology to preserve the fundamental right of women to control their own lives & destinies, i.e. the right recognized by the Supreme Court 46 years ago.

Interestingly enough, I read somewhere that Stevens in an interview mentioned that in his confirmation hearings - no one asked him about his opinion on Roe, which had only been decided three years earlier.

Yep, not a single senator asked Stevens a question about Roe or about his views on abortion which, if anything, serves as an additional measure of just how uncontroversial Roe was at the time.

Among the political classes, yes. But Roe (with Griswold to a lesser extent) birthed a whole new generation of political activists who saw the decision as pretty awful from the start.

[Senator Incitatus]

Among the political classes, yes. But Roe (with Griswold to a lesser extent) birthed a whole new generation of political activists who saw the decision as pretty awful from the start.

Not really, though. It was pretty much Jerry Falwell & the evangelical leaders of the Moral Majority movement's seizing onto abortion in the late 1970s as a powerful religious conservative rallying cry that turned it into an important voting issue for Republicans.
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As I said above — Catholics like Ellen McCormack were on the issue first, and they were mostly Democrats. The evangelical "Moral Majority" doesn't deserve that kind of credit.

Anyway, unclear how what you're saying contradicts what I said. If anything, it seems to confirm it — grassroots groups including Falwell (but largely not of his creation or under his leadership) saw Roe as immediately repugnant and organized to overturn it. It could be added that they were already organizing in opposition to liberalizing state abortion laws prior to Roe, but Roe really energized voters immediately.