An Irish parliamentarian is to take an illegal abortion pill in Dublin to defy the continued ban on most terminations in the Republic.

The Socialist party’s TD Ruth Coppinger travelled to Northern Ireland on Tuesday along with 30 other pro-choice activists to receive abortion pills from the pro-choice organisation Women on Web.

The Irish state still bans abortion pills and last year the Republic’s Customs service seized more than 1,000 tablets that were posted from Britain and Europe to Irish women seeking to terminate their pregnancies.

Despite recent reforms that allowed for limited abortions in the state where a woman’s life is in danger either through medical complications of if she is in danger of taking her own life, most Irish women seeking terminations still have to obtain them abroad.

Women who are raped and those whose babies will be stillborn are not entitled in law to have abortions in Irish hospitals.

The pro-choice group has branded their action as the “abortion pill train”, named after a similar protest in the 1970s when a group of Irish feminists travelled on the Enterprise express train to Belfast to buy condoms. They challenged the state to have them arrested when they arrived back in Dublin’s Connolly station with the contraceptives. At the time condoms were illegal in the republic.

Coppinger said most Irish people were now far ahead of politicians in terms of liberalising the country’s abortion laws. She said she would take one of the pills herself, stressing that they were safer than taking Viagra.

“They [politicians] continue to give Catholic beliefs centrality when a large majority now favour allowing abortion to protect women’s health, both physical and mental,” Coppinger said before her trip north.

The women will travel back from Belfast to Dublin on Tuesday, where they will attend a rally to mark the second anniversary of the death of Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar. She died in Galway University hospital after being refused a termination even though she knew the child she was carrying was dead and that she would suffer severe blood poisoning if the pregnancy continued.