My kidneys are my property.

But the legislative hurdles that keep my kidneys from consensually leaving my body are killing thousands in this country every year.

Just today, 17 people will die waiting for an organ transplant. Just today, viable transplant organs that could save many lives will be lost in U.S. hospitals.

The number of people who could be saved by donated organs is much greater than the number people who had to die to donate.

If it were easier to donate, more lives would be saved. To make it easier, the country’s current organ donation system must undergo a radical change, and organ sales must be legalized.

The way the organ donation system currently stands usually leaves the surviving family of a donor candidate struggling to figure out what their loved one would want if she were capable of making the choice. Even in the steadiest emotional times, this would be a difficult choice to make for another person. When this choice comes at times of emotional trauma, the difficulty is immeasurably greater.

This situation so often faces families because of the opt-in configuration of the system, which means that, unless a person actively seeks to become a donor or is directly asked about it through a driver’s license application, he or she is not a donor.

If he or she is not a donor and becomes brain dead, for example, the decision of what to do with healthy organs lies with the family.

A better way to get more self-donors would be an opt-out system in which a person would have to actively seek to remove himself or herself as a donor. Otherwise, an adult would automatically be on the donor list.

Considering only 7 percent of Americans say they are opposed to organ donation, it is rather incongruous that a mere 30 percent of adults are organ donors.

Such numbers could be leveled largely by an opt-out system. By nature, people are far more likely to take the effort to avoid things they strongly oppose than they are to take time for something they mildly support or don’t think about at all.

As long as proper measures were taken to raise public awareness about such a key system change, opposition would be nearly nonexistent.

Other countries have experienced great success with an opt-out system. Austria and Hungary both have less than 1 percent of their population choosing to opt out, and their waiting lists for organs are dramatically shorter than those in countries with opt-in systems.

The other half of the transplant issue comes down to organ sales.

The knee-jerk reaction that says sales lead to exploitation and human trafficking is not unfounded.

If any story surfaces about this on the news, it is usually a tale of desperation and poverty that leads a person to sell his organs to feed his family.

Yes, this can and does happen. But the often-deadly consequences of these tales occur not because an organ is being sold, but because the transaction has been forced onto a black market.

When a good in high demand is made illegal, transactions don’t stop. They just continue in a manner a government cannot regulate for safety.

This is the state of organ sales in the U.S. and most other developed countries. People are desperate for organs and will use illicit means to save their own lives.

However, because they have to use underground markets, medical skills and sanitary measures are not always adequate.

Beyond increasing safety and survival, legalizing organ sales would open a large pocket of potential living donors who have otherwise been prohibited by cost and lack of incentive.

A system of legal organ sales would actually be much less inclined to play on the desperation of the poor than a black market does. When money is offered in exchange for an organ within a legal situation, the money is in recompense for the time and costs of being a donor. While the donor’s evaluations and surgery are paid for by the recipient, lost wages, traveling expenses and childcare costs are not covered.

Live donor surgeries require traveling to a regional donation hospital and take an average of three to five days of hospitalization and another four to eight weeks of recovery time. If these costs were alleviated by the legalization of payment for organs, those inhibited by cost but not by desire to be a living donor would then be able to share their life.

Additionally, those who could not afford to buy an organ in this manner would be bumped closer and closer to the top of the recipient list, as those wealthy enough to buy organs legally could make the purchase and remove themselves from the list.

As it stands, there is a multiplicity of flaws in the organ transplant system. But with drastic changes to this system, as well as an increase of publicity for the issue, we could save another 17 lives every day.

Sarah Dorn is an English junior. Her column appears every other Monday.