Like many women, Mrs. Stern has followed the news that Marissa Mayer, the new chief of Yahoo, is pregnant with her first child, due in October. Ms. Mayer, 37, told Fortune that her maternity leave would be “a few weeks long, and I’ll work throughout it.”

With those nine words, she opened a new front in the debate over work-life balance and that nettlesome phrase “having it all.” The debate was already simmering in the wake of an article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who had been director of policy planning at the State Department but found, as she wrote, “that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”

Ms. Mayer’s approach? “I like to stay in the rhythm of things,” she told Fortune.

The reactions — on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere — have varied widely. Some criticized Ms. Mayer as a poor role model for working women. Others congratulated her for embracing two challenges at once. Another camp marveled at her naïveté about what was in store.

But what about women who have already taken the path of an abbreviated leave? What do they make of the feverish parsing of Ms. Mayer’s postpartum plans? In interviews, many said that for women at the top of their profession or running their own show, the decision to not take a traditional leave can feel like an empowering choice — and at the same time, not a choice at all.

“You can think of a lot of moms who have more than one child, and do they ever say, ‘I’m going to stop feeding my older child because I have a newborn’?” asked Pooja Sankar, 31, chief executive of Piazza, an online forum for teachers and students to solve problems. Ms. Sankar, who gave birth to her first child three weeks ago, thinks of Piazza as one of her own, too: “I’m the C.E.O. of a company. This ‘child’ depends on me to run, to exist, really.”