It is you that is quite confused. I get that there was a national movement against state abortion laws, however with nothing to back up abortion rights in the US constitution, the right way to proceed would have been to push a US Constitutional amendment to make abortion a federal issue. The SCOTUS cannot simply repeal laws that are relegated to the states. That is why Roe vs Wade ultimately failed. In the roughly 50 years that Roe V Wade was in force, the abortion movement or the democrat party could have at least codified Roe V Wade into law, which would have given it more teeth, however they didn't. And that was intentional They chose to keep it vulnerable to a future SCOTUS decision reversing it, for the sake of fundraising and fighting off conservative nominees to the federal bench or the SCOTUS. They did not expect that it would actually be reversed, but they played it that way for political benefit. To put it more bluntly, the democrat party played people like you.
I don't think you get the reasoning of the medical professionals in the movement.
At that time, the only reason shared by all the state governments for allowing abortion was to save a woman's life. In some states, abortion was also allowed by exceptions for the woman's physical health, mental health, and, more rarely in cases of rape and incest.
No one had anticipated that a prescribed medication taken in pregnancy could result in serious fetal deformity, and people were genuinely furious that drugs had been developed that could cause this.
Meanwhile, the exceptions in state laws were not great, because abortion was treated as so criminal that it was easier to let a woman die or be permanently disabled, etc., than try to care for her, given the harsh punishments the law imposed on doctors. But doctors took an oath to do no harm to patients, and just refusing them abortions could harm them. The overproduction of kids also harmed women in the fifties - it is well known that having more than four kids has terrible effects on most women's health, and some women are harmed by producing more than one or two.
The whole culture of overproduction of children and hardship in the law pushed women into trying to end pregnancies by trying to cause deliberate miscarriages, etc. So secret networks of medical practitioners, at least in major cities, offered illegal abortion services
No one I knew back then thought fetuses were persons, not even the anti-abortion people. Save for Catholics, almost no one in the US liked the existing laws. Even most Evangelicals thought the strict anti-abortion laws were wrong and imposed terrible hardship on girls and women.
So when Roe v Wade was reasoned, the issue of whether or not medical doctors had a right to offer safe, legal abortions because of their oath was not countered by a claim that the fetus was a person with rights. The issue was, could the state make a restriction that could physically and mentally harm girls and women when the point of medical treatment was to prevent harm? It was, what was state government doing to the persons that girls and women were if it forced them to continue rape pregnancies, incestuous pregnancies, when there were laws against rape and incest, so the pregnancies themselves were extensions of the crimes? It was, what state government was forcing girls and women to risk their lives and health to give birth to known fetal deformities that were created by some medical error that wasn't their fault? Wasn't this violating the rights of persons?
You don't have to answer the questions the way the SC justices did in Roe v Wade. But if you want to understand the issue, you have to grasp that people all over the US were horrified at the casual way in which state law forced doctors to deny patients what they thought was ethical medical treatment and forced girls and women to risk harm to themselves and continue bodily states that they themselves considered ethically evil.
