On the merits of the law, in the 60s/70s, SCOTUS Justice Hugo Black in particular was reading up a lot on the civil war amendments (especially the 14th) and the radical Republicans (very different from the current "Republican" party) who pushed through the amendments. They had intended for the Bill of Rights (plus some unclear/unspecified enumerated rights) to apply against the states via the 14th amendment. This is what the 2nd sentence of the 14th Amendment refers to:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
However, this was gutted soon after the civil war by traitorous segregationists and Jim Crow sympathizers on the Supreme Court (primarily in the slaughterhouse cases) and was dead and buried and never heard from for nearly a century.
Sadly, the early republicans are also arguably at fault here. When Salmon Chase died, Ulysses S. Grant picked Morrison Waite to replace him as Chief Justice. Despite some politicians voicing concern over his selection, he was unanimously approved by the senate. Waite ended up being the deciding vote (it was 5-4) in United States v. Cruikshank, by far the WORST supreme court decision ever made. It basically said "the bill of rights doesn't apply to the states" and it overturned the convictions of several white Louisianians who were arrested for killing hundreds of blacks (and 3 whites) in the Colfax massacre.
Yeah, pretty brutal sh!t.
So subsequently, when the Supreme Court started reversing course, and finally enforcing the bill of rights against state governments, and also started moving to finally rule against Jim Crow, they were looking at this. They had a choice; either overrule the earlier segregationist precedent, or ignore it. They went with the John Roberts style solution of overruling it de facto, without actually saying that they overruled it, and simply read it into the clause right after (the due process clause) instead, so that they didn't have to overrule previous (by that point very old) SCOTUS interpretation of the P or I clause. The thing is, the Bill of Rights (in the 9th amendment particularly, though also effectively in some other places) explicitly says that there are unenumerated rights, which therefore also apply via the 14th amendment against the states. This then led to Griswold v Connecticut, which held that "The Connecticut statute forbidding use of contraceptives violates the right of marital privacy which is within the penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights" and then that led to Roe v. Wade.
That looks like just judicial activism/fabrication by the Supreme Court if you are actually just looking at the Due Process clause (which at first glance seems fair enough, since that is what they do refer to). But if you recognize that the P or I clause was intended to do this in the first place, and that really they were just applying the intent for the P or I clause to the Due Process clause, then you recognize that Roe v. Wade was not judicial activism at all. Rather, the judicial activism was conducted 100 years beforehand by the segregationists who gutted the 14th amendment in the first place and stripped it of its intended application. It would probably have been a better call for the sake of clarity for SCOTUS in the 1960s/70s to do this via the P or I clause, but SCOTUS (even the Warren Court) is a small c conservative institution that doesn't like to overrule very old precedent, so they avoided doing that, with the result that they distorted popular understanding of their decision and made it seem illegitimate, when in reality it was not.
This is a fair point, and arguably they SHOULD have overturned the old reconstruction (and post reconstruction) supreme court rulings outright. But the Supreme Court has this bizarre tendency to try and wriggle it through existing precident, which is part of why Roe is often seen as "judicial activism" by critics.
John Roberts will now almost certainly try to do a similar sort of thing regarding Roe as SCOTUS earlier did regarding much segregationist precedent; overturning it in reality while not saying that he has overturned it. The only question is if the other 5 partisan Republicans on SCOTUS let him get away with his deceptive trickery, or if they want to say the words "Roe v. Wade is overturned."
Correct, they won't overturn Roe because that would be a political sh**tshow. No, instead they'll say the Texas and Mississippi so-called "heartbeat" laws (what's being measured isn't a heartbeat, it's electrical activity) are somehow "not an undue burden on the woman", corrupting the logic of Planned Parenthood v. Casey and coming up with a bullsh!t way to allow the law to stay in place. So Roe will more or less stay in force, but only on paper.
I'm not sure if Roberts will rule with the other 5 conservative judges though. He joined the liberals in trying to block the Texas bill from entering force, even though he opposes abortion. But we'll have to wait and see :/
I don't think Oberfell will be overturned, IIRC Neil Gorsuch wouldn't approve of that. Roberts was in the minority in Oberfell, but I doubt he really cares enough to overturn it at this point, so arguably there's not as much of a threat to Oberfell.
