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Roe v. Wade is a popular allusion, but it's a really bad comparison. The right didn't spend decades trying every legal variant they could think of. The day after Roe v. Wade dropped, every single county in the country just treated abortion as legal through the first half of gestation. The closest immediate challenge was Danforth, and the restrictions there were either well outside of Roe's text (spousal approval, parental approval for minors) or within an area Roe specifically entertained (a methods-based ban on saline injection that the medical community had just started disfavoring in preference to prostaglandin and, the next year, D&E). Thornburgh was the sort of waiting period law and information-passing that The_Nybbler would consider an outright blessing compared to what New Jersey does for his interests. Hell, Akron did a specific thing Blackmun gave as acceptable (hospital requirements) and lost on it anyway because they had ill motive about it.
Most were just plainly outside of Roe, and not even arguably. Several major SCOTUS battles focused on federal funding, like Beal, Maher, Poelker, and the Hyde Amendment, but Roe never held that public facilities had to perform abortions. Connecticut v. Menillo had a state court invalidate a pre-Roe conviction for an unlicensed 'hobbyist' abortionist, and SCOTUS had to step in to say that Roe didn't mean randos could just go around pretending to be doctors for the purpose of abortion. Bigelow v. Virginia (in addition to being one of my go-to examples for why New Jersey can burn in hell) was about a statute that dated back to 1878, and turned on the First Amendment question.
It was only after replacing almost the entire SCOTUS bench and producing a widespread new judicial philosophy over two decades that we saw Casey, and even Casey was still futzing with the edges of how interest-balancing was done. It took another decade before you started to see serious efforts to actually go after its central ruling, and another two past that to actually overturn Roe.
Don't get me wrong; those were legal games. But they're a separate class from politicians in multiple states responding to Bruen the week of with press conferences explicitly stating they were going to make carry permits useless to carry anywhere (and then adding injury to insult by not issuing carry permits either), or Masterpiece Cake Shop by trying to support even dumber activist lawsuits with clearer malicious intent against the exact same target, or Calce after Caetano.
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