To be clear, even liberal scholars have recognized the infirmity of
Roe as a legal decision for decades:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tim-carney-defense-of-abo...> "One of the most curious things about Roe," wrote liberal Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe "is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found."
> Alan Dershowitz, another legendary liberal Harvard Law professor, called Roe "judicial activism" lacking "clear governing constitutional principles."
> There are plenty more like this. Pro-choice Yale and Harvard Law professor John Hart Ely wrote that Roe "is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be."
> Why did they wait 50 years to correct this obvious outlier?
Because once a precedent has been set, the Supreme Court isn't obliged to revisit it, even if everyone comes to believe the decision is wrong. Whereas the merits of the original decision are quite technical, whether to overrule precedent or not is highly discretionary. It considers factors like whether the original decision failed to settle the underlying controversy, whether it creates a rule that is hard to apply in practice, etc. See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis
It's this discretionary aspect that made Roe a sitting duck. Liberals obviously had no reason to overrule Roe even if they, like Justice Ginsburg, believed the decision was flawed. And for a long time, Republicans appointed social liberals to the Court who were happy to kick the can down the road because they were worried about the political ramifications.
Note that the politics doesn't matter for whether the decision is correct or not in the first place, but it's an entirely reasonable basis for deciding whether or not to go to the trouble of overruling an incorrect precedent.
> And why did several of the judges lie to Congress when they said they would not change Roe?
They didn't say they "would not change Roe" they said they recognized "Roe is precedent." As explained above, precedent can be overturned.