But the whole thing seems a bit silly to me. The baby isn’t trespassing. It didn’t purposely decide to enter the womb. We’ve got to use a bit of common sense here.

Suppose there’s a blizzard outside. Someone comes inside my house, freezing, no coat on.

Do I have the right to send him out into the cold, with no jacket, knowing full well he could die of hypothermia?

We have an obligation towards other human beings.

Exactly. An easement is actually one of the cases I think can be made against Dr. Block’s argument.

Under a libertarian view of property rights, you have no obligation to let that person into your house. The fact that he’s freezing to death does not give him an ethical right to use your property. Repeat after me: a person’s need does not give him a right.

But from a Christian moral perspective, it’s pretty clear that you have to let him in.

“But the conflict invariably occurs when the mother, who owns her body, no longer wants to permit the child in her body.”
…
“But as it stands right now, despite the tragedy of lost life - the mother has every right to evict according to Dr. Block.”

If a woman is so worried about a baby trespassing in her womb, maybe she should think ahead and keep something else out.

I agree. Dr. Block does deal with possible objections of this line, but I don’t think he does a good enough job. I will cover this later - but essentially, I think there is an implicit contract when a mother let’s “something else” in. This doesn’t solve the problem when a mother does not agree to it, but that can be dealt with in other ways.

You are neglecting a rather obvious fact: the baby is already in the house, and it was the choice of the mother and not of the baby to be in the house.

This doesn’t solve the problem when a mother does not agree to it, but that can be dealt with in other ways.

It doesn’t, but that’s not the situation 99.9% of the time. (I didn’t actually look that number up, but you get the idea). People like to bring up rare cases that favor their view more, but we need to look at the overwhelmingly majority situation.

Under a libertarian view of property rights, you have no obligation to let that person into your house. The fact that he’s freezing to death does not give him an ethical right to use your property. Repeat after me: a person’s need does not give him a right.

My preferred example is this:
If allow someone to board my airplane, do I have the right to evict them in mid-air while in flight?

Obviously I would not have the right to initially allow them to board my airplane (meaning that contraceptives would be fully permissible). Obviously once I have landed I have every right to safely evict them, at a time and place the will not result in their immediate death (flying them to a remote arctic location and offloading them against their will would also be wrong).

If Dr Block would agree that I have the right to evict him from my airplane in mid-air after having knowingly allowed him to board, then he has a consistent position which which I disagree. Otherwise, this is simply another attempt to use inconsistent logic to support an arbitrary moral position.

Dr. Block deals with this exact scenario you mention in one of his lectures on the subject. Suffice it to say, I think he dismisses the objection too casually - saying that the baby is not part of the contract so the plane example doesn’t matter.